Brilliant formal eruptions every fifteen minutes or so are balanced by Gance's tendency to engage in redundancies that seem typical of the era's attempts at 'pure cinema' (I have many of the same problems with Murnau's The Last Laugh). So, for example, Gance can't just communicate Sisif's blindess in two or three well-chosen images, he's got to take an entire reel to show Sisif stumbling around his cabin, frequently cutting to POV shots that underscore what's become obvious in the…

A movie about memory, and about clothes and food and cigarettes and Nat King Cole records, all of which play their part in a story not only of lost love, but of an ancient empire in which love collapsed in on itself in a quiet apocalypse. In his attention to minutiae, Wong realizes the aesthetic ambitions of the 1920s film theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, the prophet of photogénie, the fetishistic obsession with photographic detail and arrested gesture. In its…