Tag: cinephilia
Will the cinema experience survive?
In the past month, I have written 15 articles about American professional football. That fact may not be of interest to readers of a movie blog – especially an international one like Curnblog whose readers probably think American football is the equivalent of Tom Hooper’s Cats, overblown and silly, spectacle over substance, with the odd…
The Cinema of 1969: Five classics you may have missed
I’ve started writing fifty-year memory essays of late. It’s probably because I am now far enough past fifty to recall the world I lived in fifty years ago. I mean, I have written about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Double Indemnity (1944) as well, but if I have to go back one hundred…
Celebrating 50 years of ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’
It was late March, 1972, and at the Olympia Theater on Broadway, New York film fans were eagerly anticipating a series of Cuban movies, kicked off by Humberto Solas’s historical epic Lucia. The screening was interrupted by a stink bomb – and by the appearance of rats – both reportedly the work of anti-Castro protestors.…
Cinema and the Art of Looking
This last New Year’s Eve I stood on a cliff above a beach in North Cornwall, England. The wind was up and wild, and it was cold, but I hardly noticed. I was transfixed by a pair of lesser black-backed gulls that were darting along the shoulders of a huge rolling wave, surf spraying above…
Reconciling with Cinema: Never Enough Time for Catching Up
Sometime in the late 1990s, cinema and I came to terms with the inevitable. We’d been drifting apart for some time and now it seemed that the distance between us had become too great. It should have been a painful wrench. I’d grown up with movies; they’d been a still point in a peripatetic childhood.…