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The Batman 2022
The Batman might just be the perfect primer for any filmmaker who wants to turn a mediocre script of 15 pages into a ponderous film of 3 hours (and has the budget to do so). I can't wait for the 6-hour sequel about how the Batman learned to stop worrying and love Gotham and why the Penguin is most definitely not a rat with wings.
Seriously, though, how did we let our superheroes get so mopey and dopey? I've grown…
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Witch's Cradle 1944
To me, Witch's Cradle is a horror story about the line. Art starts with a line, or so some say. But ask any Dadaist worth their salt, and they’ll say linearity is anathema to art. Dadaism took an axe to linearity, whether that meant continuity, rationality, nationality, or any other conventionality of the day.
Maya Deren, too, was an outspoken critic of linearity in cinema. As in art, in film you can manipulate the medium to disrupt time—through repetition, jump…
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Manufractur 1985
Manufraktur begins and ends with hands (manus). Juxtaposing hands and automobiles, Tscherkassky suggests the production of speed and fracturing of time and space. Hands, or industry, create and operate the machines that have historically altered the subject's relationship with time and space. A world in motion is fragmented, blurred, torn apart and reassembled in disorienting ways. Tscherkassky turns this fragmentation back on industry by taking found commercial footage and distorting its representativeness.
Hands also manufacture film. Cinema has also historically…
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Richard III 1955
Richard III is Laurence Olivier's (ahem) crowning achievement as a producer and director of Shakespeare on film. Despite the reputation of Henry V as wartime propaganda (which is true but has also given many an easy way to unfairly dismiss it), the film is really an argument for translating Shakespearean theater to cinema. Hamlet allows Olivier to explore cinematic technique even further by incorporating elements of film noir, German Expressionism, and Universal horror into the sets and cinematography. Yet, in…
