Author: Jonathan Eig
Unresolved Endings on Screen: The Art of the Lingering Question
In his book Cinema and Soviet Society, Russian scholar Peter Kenez notes this fascinating piece of artistic anthropology: In pre-revolutionary Russia, it was not uncommon for silent film directors to shoot two separate endings for a movie. A happy ending would be marketed specifically toward the USA and Western Europe, while at home in Russia,…
Blue Ruin: Deconstructing the Storyteller
Unless you are intimately involved in a movie’s production, it can be virtually impossible to determine where the writer’s role ends and the director’s begins, or how much credit/blame to assign to the actor or the cinematographer. One of the reasons the auteur theory gained such credibility in the past half century is that it…
In the Realm of the Senses: Sex and Cinema
Here in the States, they say the hardest thing to do in sports is hit a baseball. In film, the hardest thing may be to film a good, honest sex scene. There are plenty of reasons for this. Unless you routinely scatter banana peels around your home, sex is the closest most of us are…
Jim Jarmusch: Only Indie Left Alive
Early on in Jim Jarmusch’s first feature film, Permanent Vacation (1980), its vagabond hero Allie reads aloud a passage from Les Chants de Maldoror, and quickly announces he is bored by the meandering surrealistic narrative. Toward the end of Jarmusch’s eleventh and latest feature, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), vampire hero Adam watches a talented…
Raising the Barn: 7 Great Musical Moments
Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly tower over the American musical film. America barely produces musicals anymore – India now dominates that market – but the classic American product, from MGM or Fox, from Lerner and Loewe and Porter, is still what most people think of when they think of the musical. Maybe more than any…