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"Signs and Meaning in the Cinema", Peter Wollen

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Peter Wollen (1938-2019) was a theorist, screenwriter (he co-wrote Antonioni’s The Passenger ), film critic (in addition to Screen magazine, where he developed his film theories, he wrote for the New Left Review under the pseudonym Lee Russell) and filmmaker. His most famous films were co-signed with his wife Laura Mulvey. His most remembered work is the seminal book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema , which discussed, in a captivating and accessible way, the semiotic and structuralist approach in the cinematographic context.  The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with the theoretical and filmic work of Eisenstein. The second, about the auteur theory, investigates the recurrence of themes and images in some directors' careers, namely Hawks and Ford. And the third one develops how a film should be seen as a system of signs and codes, a bearer of a personal language to which the viewer has to adapt himself, referencing also the aesthetic innovations of Jean-Luc Godar...
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"My Life and My Films", Jean Renoir

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Jean Renoir, son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, is considered one of the greatest filmmakers in film history, a master in the use of depth of field (that would inspire Orson Welles, though he would use it in a more egocentric perspective and by establishing different hierarchies of power between his characters, unlike Renoir who used it to concentrate various actions on small individual stages), the search for both a sonic and visual realism, and whose work is particularly marked by the humanism and life that inhabits his characters. The most well-known phrase of his filmic career is spoken by himself, playing the character Octave in La Règle du Jeu (1939), "You see, in this world, there is an awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons." , leaving explicit the sympathy for the different characters with conflicting points of view and their pertinent idiosyncrasies that is present in his films. His cinema is so marked by his personality that An...
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"Films and Feelings", Raymond Durgnat

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We chose not to write a text about this book, as we think that the summary in the back cover gives, indeed, the best description of it. We would like only to give the brief note that Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote about it: "This first collection by the most thoughtful, penetrating, and far-reaching of UK film critics ever remains scandalously overlooked and undervalued. Conceivably more ideas per page can be found here than in the work of any other English-language critic (...)." Summary: Raymond Durgnat here examines literally hundreds of films-- from Birth of a Nation to those of the 1960's, from Hollywood smashes to 'avant garde' obscurities, from all parts of the world-- in an effort to isolate universals of the language of films and to loft their poetics to an articulate level. Beyond what interest it may possess as a collection of different cinematic topics, this text is offered also as a basis for re-exploring an art-form which seems to pose certain a...
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"Million Dollar Movie", Michael Powell

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Michael Powell (1905-1990) was a British filmmaker, for many the most important one right after Alfred Hitchcock (for whom he worked as a still photographer), and a big influence on the movie brats generation, namely in Scorsese and Coppola. His first films as a director were quota-quickies, that is, about one-hour films made with modest resources and quickly, in order to force exhibitors to show more British films and to stimulate the national film industry. It was in 1937 that he made his first major film (as he himself defines it in his memoirs),  The Edge of the World , a film of pictorial beauty and rural mysticism, filmed on the island of Foula, where the wind in the local vegetation and the clouds in the sky shape and reflect the turbulence of the characters' emotions. Such pastoral visuals would be repeated in at least three of the best films he signed with Emeric Pressburger,  A Canterbury Tale ,  I Know Where I'm Going! , and  Going to Earth . I...
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"A Life in Movies", Michael Powell

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Michael Powell (1905-1990) was a British filmmaker, for many the most important one right after Alfred Hitchcock (for whom he worked as a still photographer), and a big influence on the movie brats generation, namely in Scorsese and Coppola. His first films as a director were quota-quickies, that is, about one-hour films made with modest resources and quickly, in order to force exhibitors to show more British films and to stimulate the national film industry. It was in 1937 that he made his first major film (as he himself defines it in his memoirs), The Edge of the World , a film of pictorial beauty and rural mysticism, filmed on the island of Foula, where the wind in the local vegetation and the clouds in the sky shape and reflect the turbulence of the characters' emotions. Such pastoral visuals would be repeated in at least three of the best films he signed with Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale , I Know Where I'm Going! , and Going to Earth . It is by the films h...
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"My Last Breath", Luis Buñuel

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Luis Buñuel (1900-83) was a Spanish filmmaker, born in Calanda (whose drums he used for the soundtracks of his films, such as Nazarín (1959)), where he had a Catholic education, which to a greater or lesser extent is satirized in his films. In Paris, he made contact with the surrealist movement, where the friendship he formed with Salvador Dalí led to the creation of two controversial films with Freudian interpretations, Un Chien Andalou  (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930). In Spain, Mexico and France, he created his body of work, essentially marked by criticisms of the bourgeoisie with its hypocrisies and neuroses, analyzing humorously the attachment it shows to patriarchy and Catholicism in successive tortuous repressions of desire, where there is no lack of a delicious fetish for legs and feet. Some of his most acclaimed films: Los Olvidados (1950, particularly marked by its social realism), Él (1953), Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962), Diary of a Chambermaid (...
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"Fun in a Chinese Laundry", Josef von Sternberg

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“His characters generally make their entrance at a moment in their lives when there is no tomorrow. Knowingly or unknowingly, they have reached the end or the bottom, but they will struggle a short time longer, about ninety minutes of screen time, to discover the truth about themselves and those they love.” The words are from The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris in its entry dedicated to Josef von Sternberg, and they correctly (and quite beautifully) resume the romantic side of the films directed by the Austrian-American filmmaker.  Sternberg (born Jonas Sternberg) began to work in a millinery shop that gave him knowledge of different ornate textiles that he would embody in his mise en scène . In his films, men are attracted to mysterious women in exotic and sometimes turbulent settings (revolutionary China, Imperial Russia, Word War I Austria) in which love, lust, humiliation, sado-masochistic jealousy and sacrifice are all displayed in pictorial compositions with strong g...
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