Movies
Here is a library of random movies you can watch on this site.
Here are some random reviews of some of the movies we’ve seen.
Great Movies since 2000
John Cassavetes Festival
2024 Summer Outdoor Movie Festival
Bryant Park Junior Version (aka our backyard)
Hallowe’en 2024
(George Romero)
Elaine May Festival
New German Cinema
1974 Oscars
Robert Altman Festival
Hallowe’en 2023
(’80s Shapeshifters)
Peter Greenaway Festival
I moved all the movie links, plus a bunch of articles and a bunch of his early short films to a separate page.
Modern Romance Foley Scene
What is a foley artist? Albert Brooks’s Modern Romance is the best movie ever made about film editing. Here is the great scene from that movie about fixing the footsteps in James L. Brooks’s science fiction epic.
Our next movies are going to be chosen from Sight and Sound’s 2022 top 100 lists. Here are links to them:
Sight and Sound Greatest 100
Sight and Sound Directors’ 100
Here are links to the movies we’ll be watching from the Sight and Sound lists. Most of these movies are available on HBO in addition to the link provided here.
All about Eve (dir. Mankiewicz, 1950)
Rashomon (dir. Kurosawa, 1950)
Persona (dir. Bergman, 1966)
Army of Shadows (dir. Melville, 1969)
The Apartment (dir. Wilder, 1960)
Paris Is Burning (dir. Livingston, 1990)
Possession (dir. Żuławski, 1981)
Do the Right Thing (dir. Lee, 1989)
Chunking Express (dir. Wong, 1994)
Fear Eats the Soul (dir. Fassbinder, 1974)
La Ciénaga (dir. Martel, 2001)
Silverman, Kaja
“Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image”
Okay, this is the nerdiest and most annoying I will ever get, I promise. If you can finish reading this paragraph without finding me completely insufferable, I think we can be confident in the stability and longevity of our friendship. One of my all-time favorite books is Male Subjectivity at the Margins by Kaja Silverman. She’s a Marxist, Freudian, feminist film theorist who was very big in the ’80s. (When I first moved to San Francisco, she was teaching at Berkeley, and I thought seriously about finding her office to say hi. I was sure she would recognize fellow genius right away.) A chapter in that book—this one, “Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image”—is all about the movie Fear Eats the Soul. This article is very long, but I find it very interesting, and if you get a chance to read it, it would give us a taste of truly hardcore ’80s feminist film theory, and a whole different way of approaching movies from our usual conversations. Silverman also has an amazing article about Blade Runner I’ll upload, though we don’t have any plans to watch it again in the near future.
Silverman, Kaja
Male Subjectivity at the Margins
Here is the full book that the above article came out of. The whole thing is interesting–T.E. Lawrence, Fassbinder, Henry James, Lacan, Schreber, Guattari, really wide ranging. It’s about how marginalized male subjectivity–homosexual, masochist, transvestite–complicates the feminist critique of the male gaze. Super interesting.
Bassan, Raphaël
“Three French Neo-Baroques”
This is the article that is purported to have identified the “cinéma du look” movement. Thing is, it didn’t! This article argues against critiques who were dismissive of these movies. As far as I can tell, “cinéma du look” was invented by a writer in Cahier du Cinéma, but it will require further research to definitively find the origin of term, but it is most definitely not this article. This article coins the much more complimentary and accurate, “neo-baroque.” Either way it is a far-ranging and thought-provoking article. It was only translated into English one time before for a very obscure and unavailable (online) book about Luc Besson. This, then, is the only currently available English-language version, translated by . . . me!
Bassan, Raphaël
“Three French Neo-Baroques”
(side-by-side translation)
Here is the same article, printed side-by-side with the original if you are interested.
Peter Greenaway Short Movies
Here is a page with links to some of Peter Greenaway’s early short movies,
Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue) (dir. Besson, 1988)
Le Grand Bleu does not seem to be available on regular streaming services in the US. (It ain’t nothing but the most successful film in France in the 1980s!) So we have to watch it on 123. The site linked to here seems to be good, I didn’t see a single ad. But, watching movies this way is an acquired skill–if you haven’t done it before, let me know. Also, I did not realize this movie is actually in English! There are three versions of the movie: the original French was 132 minutes, the recut American version (they even changed the score to a Bill Conti version (Gonna Fly Now)) at 118 minutes. Then there’s an extended “director’s cut.” This version is that one, at 168 minutes.
La lune dans le caniveau (Moon in the Gutter) (dir. Beineix, 1983)
La lune dans le caniveau is also available on archive.org.
King Lear (dir. Godard, 1983)
King Lear is also available on archive.org.