The Story of Film
Mark Cousins
Language: English
Pages: 512
ISBN: 186205942X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Shining (BFI Film Classics)
Seven Samurai (BFI Film Classics)
1962. Truffaut himself made his first feature film in 1959. Les Quatres cents coups/The 400 Blows did not use jump cuts like Godard’s A bout de souffle but was startlingly fresh and worshipped cinema just as much. The story of a twelve-year-old boy who escapes from a children’s home, falls in love with film and goes on the run, was based on elements of the director’s own life. Like Godard, Truffaut had his film shot with only natural light on real Parisian streets. His story was loosely
anointed in a fabulous ceremony. The imagery of the film, photographed by Subrata Mitra, is among the finest in world cinema. The theme is that of the clash between ancient Sanskrit culture and modern enlightenment values. In a manner similar to Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (Italy, 1957), it is an attack on religious fervour, but where the Italian film undergoes a series of stylistic transformations, The Goddess is consistent in its miniaturism. Two Daughters is even more so, a mass of gripping
details allowed the author to read himself into the fictional character. Jake could take a beating but many thought he was worth nothing on any higher level, a point that La Motta finally realized when, abject and imprisoned, he punches the cell walls moaning, “I am not an animal, I am not an animal.” Scorsese knew everything about this rage. It was hyper-real for him and, in the boxing scenes in the film, he showed what it felt like, how it floated through space, how it went mute, then snapped
society’s moral decline. The film’s rural scenes are shot in a simple, painterly style, but the pace of its editing increases in the second half which is set in the city. However, it is only in a few sequences that Rey stares at the real world with more intensity than was usually permitted by mainstream cinema. The films of Weber, Flaherty, Sjöström, Micheaux, Master, Painter, Von Stroheim, Vidor and Rey are wildly different in form and content. But in their social awareness or anthropological
at a school run by the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose writings he would repeatedly adapt for the screen throughout his career. In 1947, he helped set up the Calcutta Film Society, which introduced not only himself, but Ghatak and others to trends in world film. The society was a place in which film was worshipped, like similar organizations in Paris, New York and London. Ray watched Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (Soviet Union, 1925) twenty times there, and Pudovkin and Jean
