Author: Philippe Vigneres

A distressing closeup and then a tracking out movement that takes the victim and the killers in a medium shot: the crime story begins in a remarkably savage and precise manner while the attention is drawn on the camera’s motions as means to widen the picture and getting the telling…

The first vision the film delivers is actually a blurred image, caused by fingers spread over eyes. These eyes belong to a young girl playing inside the Scottish mansion that is her home but the voice-over readily played along belongs to her mother, who speaks of her muteness…

Soldiers on a truck chat as they ride to a base in an African colony ravaged by war. It is not the small talk, made up of big complaints, about assignments, routines, flaws and lacks of the military organization. It is not the litany of personal tales and feelings. And it goes beyond the…

This is an adventure of breezy, blunt and brutal private investigator Mike Hammer, created by Mickey Spillane in 1947. It starts with a fast, frenzied and frightening series of nightly, kinetic shots that feel like an instant classic show of noir shock: a barefooted…

She is the first lead character to appear on-screen and the film’s last shot shows her dark silhouette against an orange sky: this overambitious mix between a romance and a period piece, a coming-of-age tale and an epic narrates how a Southern belle, over a period of less than…

If “La dolce vita” (1960) was the film of a world where the lead character’s narrative arc looks like a fall from grace, this feature released three years later is the film of a mind where redemption becomes possible. “8½” begins with a nightmare signposting movie director…

Two helicopters flow over Rome: one is carrying a huge statue of the Christ and the other a couple of journalists reporting on the unusual air cargo bound for the Holy See. But the journos find enough time to hover above a modern building to catch the attention of some young ladies sunbathing on…

The titles roll over a geometric pattern akin to a grid eventually blurring into the black mass of the hair at the back of a head. The face is not immediately shot; actually the camera shots in closeups parts of the body as the character gets dressed, paces his airy, modern bedroom…

The title refers to a character of the folk culture of the Malabar region, in the Indian state of Kerala, an old man springing from nowhere, who comes across as an artist telling tales and singing songs, but turns out to be an uncanny magician. He fascinates the children, scaring them a little but also…

The young bride is incensed: the groom has let her down, just by getting so drunk that he cannot walk, and certainly not taking her in his arms for their first night. The camera pans and moves: the incident occurs in a wider gloomy and mucky world, a Gypsy settlement somewhere in Yugoslavia…

From the beginning to the end the voice-over is rarely quiet. The narrative is painstakingly told by Michael O’Hara, the lead character, who is eager to depict the context, ponders on his feelings, and finds at the right time the right explanations to the grim facts that have threatened…

In 1959, in house in Taipei, a man is intently listening to a radio program reporting on the results of national exams teenagers have passed to enter the university, the speaker reeling off the names of the successful students. Clearly something is wrong and the rest of this prologue shows the man…

From the summer of 1913 to the summer of 1914, a few but nasty, spectacular incidents mar the life of a quiet village in northern Germany. First the doctor is badly hurt when his horse trips over a wire stretched between trees leading to his garden. Then the wife of a peasant gets killed…

A man talks excitedly to a small group of silent fellows as well-dressed, serious, distinguished the fiery speaker, pacing up and down frantically a small spot of a huge waste ground. Then in the crowded, huge hall of a modern building official-like men stand gathered around a vast model of building to be…

Up and down, narrow and wide: the film’s first part features gorgeous long shots on mountains overlooking the rocky place where a lonely man toils to dig gold, a struggle with the flinty, stony nature that visually swings from dark close shots deep down the well he has dug to sun-scorched…