Author: Philippe Vigneres

Can the fight for equality be a simple equation only a ritualized confrontation can solve? Is not there more to it in fact, should it be not rather a wider and more complex questioning, a multifaceted, cross-pollinating fight challenging tenets and habits and then forcing a more united and complete view of humanity?

What the thing he shows her is, the giggling, affected, and silly young woman asks the famed seducer she has teased enough to draw him in a weird and lavish hiding place where she expects to experience an unforgettable carnal knowledge – with her official lover, the French…

A lonely kid, skinny and sickly, illiterate and impoverished, has his life turned around overnight when his parents, who left Venice for London eight years earlier, after the mother gave birth to him and got her own mother’s forgiveness for a marriage that the old woman condemned, move back to the tiny…

The film’s prologue relies on a virtuoso use of cross cutting editing. It starts quietly as the camera follows a little happy girl walking in the woods surrounding a countryside mansion. Her red plastic mac gives her the looks of the Little Red Riding Hood cavorting on a pleasant autumn day. There is…

There are a lot of typically picturesque shots in this story unfolding through the streets of Venice, some inevitably taken to impress with their stunning point of view – from the highs of a monument, for instance – and the lush Technicolor lends them a lovely brilliant patina. But they are not…

The rickshaw looks worryingly flimsy, weirdly decorated with those strings where colored bulbs are fixed usually associated with Christmas trees. The characters also look bizarre and barely competent to drive such a vehicle and to carry out any mission. But they do have an assignment they…

Director Orson Welles, more rakish and mesmerizing than ever, stands on a railway platform talking to a couple of children and playing magician’s tricks to charm them, including that old trick of pulling a nice big rabbit out of nowhere. The camera focuses on his hands, his well-known…

A narrator depicts a strange incident which occurred in the airspace of a European country, the sudden appearance of a small private plane with absolutely no one onboard, not even a pilot, but still flying straight ahead. This caused astonishment and scandal, the narrator notes, claiming…

These shards of glasses reflecting a nurse stepping too late in the bedroom: an astonishing idea of shot composition, the striking expression of life giving way to death and disillusion to emptiness, but also the statement of a cinematic vision, the agenda of the work to come: the film as…

The camera circles around the table of the dining room as it is laid down by a silent woman for the Sunday lunch, with a man reading his newspaper in an armchair in a corner of the room and a servant standing at a little distance, inside the frame of the door leading the dining room to the kitchen where the…

As the camera follows in a long shot a carriage, the film is first a landscape, an exploration in bleak colors of a corner of the Bergamo province in northern Italy, a vast expanse of fields and woods where stands a huge square building hosting four families of peasants working for a padrone, a…

Although disconcerting the first images prove essential by conveying sensuality and tactility in so raw and deep visual terms. The disheveled man hopping from one place to another of an endless meadow, putting childishly his fingers into the dirt and the holes, biting ravenously barks and mosses…

The final images show the lead character running away, his lanky body limping badly, his face bruised and with a black eye. He has his usual stubborn and forbidding looks but there is now a faint smile on his lips. And for the first time in this thoroughly bleak movie, the sun breaks the…

This is not a cradle-to-grave biopic: the Joseph Mallord William Turner painter the audience meets is in his early 50s and sits firmly at the firmament of the British arts, a lauded and influential master even though in this 1820s decade eyebrows start to raise and criticism to get vocal. Both his…

Fuming, pacing his studio, kicking his tools, and above all yelling, raving, insulting, the old, sick painter cuts a terrifying embittered figure. When he eventually sits and calms down, he angrily considers what failed and disappointed in his life, haunted…