The series Phantoms Among Us: The Films of Christian Petzold starts on Mubi on May 13, 2021 in many countries.Sooner or later, most interviews with Christian Petzold recur to literature as a pool of inspiration, the visceral experience of books that he synthesizes into on screen narratives. Thickening his films with references, he carefully constructs audacious architectures of ideas and aesthetic impressions, so that a “great desire for cinema” fuses with the legacy of his teacher, Harun Farocki, well known for his documentaries and essay films. Petzold’s “Spielfilme” can thus have an intellectual bent that reflects on “concepts [...] in such a way that they support one another, that each becomes articulated through its configuration with the others,” as Adorno wrote about the Essay as Form. Disparate elements, he described enigmatically, “crystallize as a configuration of their motion,” but do not come across as rigidly discursive. However, the depth suggested by...
- 5/12/2021
- MUBI
Foreplays is a column that explores under-known short films by renowned directors. Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville's Liberté et Patrie (2002) is free to watch below. Mubi's retrospective For Ever Godard is showing from November 12, 2017 - January 16, 2018 in the United States.I. One of the most beautiful essay films ever made, Liberté et Patrie (2002) turns out to also be one of the most accessible collaborations of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. The deeply moving lyricism of this short may astonish even those spectators who arrive to it casually, without any prior knowledge of the filmmakers’s oeuvre. Contrary to other works by the couple, Liberté et Patrie is built on a recognizable narrative strong enough to easily accommodate all the unconventionalities of the piece: a digressive structure full of bursts of undefined emotion; an unpredictable rhythm punctuated by sudden pauses, swift accelerations, intermittent blackouts and staccatos; a mélange of materials where...
- 12/11/2017
- MUBI
(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961; Eureka!, 12)
Cinematic trilogies have been all the rage since Pagnol's in the early 30s. But possibly the most influential was the trio that made Antonioni's beautiful, sceptical, ironic muse Monica Vitti the art house pin-up of the 1960s and created a new Italian cinema – cool, oblique, Marxist – to succeed neorealism. It began with L'Avventura, roundly booed at Cannes in 1960 by critics who thought it obscure, and concluded in 1962 with L'Eclisse, which some thought too explicit. Antonioni never made anything better than La Notte, the centrepiece of the trilogy, superbly shot in black and white by Gianni Di Venanzo, the key cinematographer of his time.
Set during a single day and night in a Milan where steel and glass skyscrapers are going up and old buildings being pulled down, it opens with a disillusioned novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) and his embittered wife (Jeanne Moreau) visiting their dying friend, a leftwing...
Cinematic trilogies have been all the rage since Pagnol's in the early 30s. But possibly the most influential was the trio that made Antonioni's beautiful, sceptical, ironic muse Monica Vitti the art house pin-up of the 1960s and created a new Italian cinema – cool, oblique, Marxist – to succeed neorealism. It began with L'Avventura, roundly booed at Cannes in 1960 by critics who thought it obscure, and concluded in 1962 with L'Eclisse, which some thought too explicit. Antonioni never made anything better than La Notte, the centrepiece of the trilogy, superbly shot in black and white by Gianni Di Venanzo, the key cinematographer of his time.
Set during a single day and night in a Milan where steel and glass skyscrapers are going up and old buildings being pulled down, it opens with a disillusioned novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) and his embittered wife (Jeanne Moreau) visiting their dying friend, a leftwing...
- 10/19/2013
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
This weekend: stunning short stories from Colm Toíbin, adventures in Russian history, a metaphysical train ride from Milan to Rome in Zone, and Robert Littell's rediscovered Vietnam-era farce.
The Empty Family: Stories By Colm Toíbin
Related story on The Daily Beast: This Week's Hot Reads
In Colm Toíbin's 2009 Booker-nominated novel, Brooklyn, he described a young girl's migration to New York from Ireland's County Wexford, and her struggle to commit to simple American happiness. In his latest work, The Empty Family, he has written a collection of stories that are similarly preoccupied with the life that might have been had a different path been taken. The stories are haunted, too, by another ghost-that of Henry James, whose life Toíbin fictionalized in The Master (2004). The first story of this new collection begins with a passage from James' notebooks recording a dinner-party anecdote told to him by Lady Gregory about a friend; in "Silence,...
The Empty Family: Stories By Colm Toíbin
Related story on The Daily Beast: This Week's Hot Reads
In Colm Toíbin's 2009 Booker-nominated novel, Brooklyn, he described a young girl's migration to New York from Ireland's County Wexford, and her struggle to commit to simple American happiness. In his latest work, The Empty Family, he has written a collection of stories that are similarly preoccupied with the life that might have been had a different path been taken. The stories are haunted, too, by another ghost-that of Henry James, whose life Toíbin fictionalized in The Master (2004). The first story of this new collection begins with a passage from James' notebooks recording a dinner-party anecdote told to him by Lady Gregory about a friend; in "Silence,...
- 1/22/2011
- by The Daily Beast
- The Daily Beast
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