Review by Tom Vick (Allmovie.com)

Probably the most notorious of Andy Warhol’s films, Blow Job has been called, jokingly, the longest reaction shot in the history of cinema. In it, an anonymous young man’s face is seen in close-up while he receives fellatio from an unseen partner. The serene voyeurism that runs through Warhols ’60s films reaches a kind of apotheosis in Blow Job. Sexuality, which is a distinct subtext in a number of his films, becomes the subject of this one but, in a typically Warholian joke on pornography, all the “action” occurs off-screen.Read More »

From the preface:

How do films work? How do they tell a story? How do they move us and make us think? This book argues that shot-by-shot analysis is the best way for film students to learn about and appreciate the filmmaker’s art. Having taught film studies for many years, Marilyn Fabe has learned that viewers trained in close analysis of single film sequences are better able to see and appreciate the rich visual and aural complexity of the film medium. Close analysis unlocks the secrets of how film images, combined with sound, can have such a profound effect on our minds and emotions.Read More »

By Liv Ullmann
(Translated by the author in colloboration with Gerry Bothmer and Erik Friis)

Published by Knopf, 1977
(Origianly published in Norwegian as Forandringen, 1976)

Quote:

She opens herself to us as she writes about working with Bergman (“No studio is as silent as his… To film with Ingmar is long stretches of happiness where everything seems real”): about living with Bergman (“His dream was the woman who had been created in one peice, but I crumbled into bits and pieces if he wasn’t careful”):about travelling with him: about his monumental genius and idiosyncrasies; She lets us feel the almost overwhelming flow of her own feelings for her young daughter; She tells us about her first love, about the husband she left, the family she came from, the people she relies on..Read More »

Plot:It is a political film-review about the Soviet Army and its struggle against the enemies of the Soviet Union.
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After one of their sons gets caught filming himself masturbating in school, Claire, who never opened up the conversation of sex with her three children, decides to encourage them to explore their sexuality freely and openly.
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Before he turned to feature filmmaking in 1968 with Naked Childhood, Pialat worked on a series of short films, many of them financed by French television. TURKISH CHRONICLES is a compendium of four pieces shot in Turkey. Corne D’Or juxtaposes a poem by Nerval with a powerful study of Ottoman architecture; Istanbul takes into the crowded streets and back alleys of a fascinating city divided between continents. Byzance uses a text by Stefan Zweig to describe the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453; Maitre Galip is another on Pialat’s perceptive studies of children that includes a poem by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet.Read More »

A great Greek short with a shocking climax.
Screened in competition at the Venice film Festival. Read More »

Everyone seems to know what film noir is, but scholars and critics cannot agree on any definition. Some go so far as to insist that there is no such thing. What is Film Noir? claims that this confusion arises from the fact that film noir is both a genre and a period style, and as such is unique in the history of Hollywood. The genre, now known as “neo-noir,” continues into the present, while the period, which began in the early 1940s, had expired by 1960. William Park surveys the various theories of film noir, defines the genre, and explains how film noir relates to the style and the period in which it was created. The book corrects several common misconceptions: that film noir was an afterthought, that Hollywood was not conscious of what it was creating, and that film noir is too amorphous to be a genre. Park also provides a very useful theory of genre and how it relates to film study.Read More »

Quote:
A formal 1861 portrait of a Chinese Mandarin and his wife is the starting point for this allegorical investigation of the fantasies spawned in the West about the East, particularly that which associates femininity with the mysterious Orient. ADYNATA presents a series of oppositions-male and female images, past and present sounds-which in and of themselves construct a minimal and fragmentary narrative, an open text of our imaginations, fears and fantasies.

Quote:
“Beautiful and beguiling…mixes Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player with The Bride of Frankenstein, a TV cop show and a Betty Boop cartoon-yielding a complex form of signification run riot.” -Jonathan RosenbaumRead More »