Night of the Living Dead
('La Nuit des Morts vivants' by Serge Daney, Cahiers du Cinema 219, April 1970)
Not enough attention has been paid to American cinema’s persistent, underground love for the apocalypse. As if too much self-righteousness could only be extended by evoking the most definitive horrors, horrors accompanied by a certain kind of pleasure, as we had previously seen in the films of DeMille (or in King’s In Old Chicago, Van Dyke’s San Francisco), a filmmaker of…
The Tales of the Pale Moon
('Les Contes de la Lune Vague' by Luc Moullet, Cahiers du Cinema 95, May 1959)
Excerpt about Ugetsu from issue 80 (January 1954) of the Japanese magazine Kinema Jumpo, in which Mizoguchi comments on his entire filmography. Translated into French by Tsutomu Iwasaki and reproduced in this issue of Cahiers.
"This film, too, I wanted to make it for a long time, but I am not happy with the result. In my opinion, the…
L'hélice et l'idée by Eric Rohmer (Cahiers du Cinema, March 1959, N° 93)
Itself, by itself, solely ONE everlastingly, and single. – Plato
We would have gladly pardoned Alfred Hitchcock for following the austere The Wrong Man with a lighter work, more of a crowd pleaser. Such was perhaps his intention when he decided to bring the novel by Boileau and Narcejac, D’entre les morts, to the screen. Now, the esoteric nature of Vertigo, so they say, repelled Americans. French…
Francois Truffaut: 'A Wonderful Certainty'
('L'Admirable Certitude', Cahiers du Cinema 46, April 1955, written under the pseudonym Robert Lachenay)
We made our discovery of Nicholas Ray seven or eight years ago with Knock on Any Door. Then at the 'Biarritz Rendez-vous' we had a dazzling confirmation in They Live By Night, which is still unmistakably his best film. Later In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground and The Lusty Men were released in Paris at one time or another -…
