What would you do if you lost everything? Imagine being old too, ill with tonsillitis, and aimlessly roaming the streets of post war Italy. Not much fun, huh? In the immortal words of Nas “…life’s a bitch and then you die” which could easily be the title of this 1952 neorealism classic from Vittorio de Sica. It’s like playing the Game of LIFE and landing on every bad space and drawing every wrong card. At that point you have to ask yourself, is life even worth living?
Film is a visual medium. This is an idea that I’ve heard repeated time and time again (certainly when I was in film school), and it’s also one I’ve taken with a grain of salt, since you could make the case that film as a medium evokes all the senses. Well, except touch, and taste, and smell… and… ok now I’m realizing film is mainly an audio-visual experience. But I suppose I’m just contemplating this idea, because my viewing of Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc relied on visuals and visuals alone, to evoke the feeling of immense dread and guilt that the film embodies. Continue reading
Welcome to Criterion Month! It seems more than appropriate that our month long ode to auteur-fueled “art” movies would begin with the era of silent comedy, which arguably first produced the idea of the auteur. Now of course this term wouldn’t come into effect for another 30 years or so, but Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton could easily be seen as the first true artists to emerge in the early 20th century from a sleepy town in the California desert known as Hollywood, with a style and vision all their own. Continue reading
