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Red Line 7000 1965
At the track, Hawks shows the commentators, the pit-crew, the drivers, their loved ones, but never the crowd. This isn't racing as spectacle but racing as vocation, as profession; racing as obsession, where the risks are known, winning is the only goal, and other people have to hope they come home. Crash after crash after crash. The odds are against them, and yet they keep racing. A perfunctory funeral, well-trodden and numbed to sentiment. The risks are known. It happens…
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Interstellar 2014
Arguably the peak (so far) of Nolan's obsession with time as a dramatic device. And it is an obsession. A film about time past and passing, ghosts and echoes, crops and wrinkles. Everything is reduced (or elevated) to seconds, minutes, decades. The dust rolling in over the hills, the waves cresting on the horizon. Getting closer. For Nolan, there is no greater commodity than time and so it hurts like hell to lose it. Recorded messages from children left behind…
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La Cérémonie 1995
"I feel sorry for you"
one of the great films about manipulation and belittlement: nonchalantly throwing a dirtied tissue back at the person who provided it without saying thank you; offering to drive someone into town as if it's the noblest thing in the world; finding out someone can't read and instinctively offering to teach them. The rich family treat Sandrine Bonnaire's maid with such casual disdain and dehumanising pity that it's no wonder she's drawn to the chaos of…
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A Tale of Autumn 1998
The way Rohmer shoots conversations between two people in this is fascinating. Characters talk objectively about their love lives together in a two-shot, before, usually as one of them says something the other doesn't agree with/want to talk about, one of them leaves the frame. The camera stays as it is, leaving one character alone in a shot made for two, while Rohmer cuts to the other in a shot of their own. The conversations continue as if nothing has…