Before I met my wife, my longest relationship lasted a span of only three months. I wasn’t afraid of commitment; I was too committed too early. I fell fast and hard. Every time. But that doesn’t mean I never went through the typical relationship bumps in the road. I fought with plenty of exes about …
Compared to John Ford’s studio-bound—though still highly appealing—South Seas adventure The Hurricane, recently reviewed here, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, directed by the great German filmmaker F.W. Murnau, is a patently more realistic and wholly distinctive production.
Another remake is on the way, but this doesn’t sound resoundingly awful. Deadline is reporting that Robert Eggers, writer and director of the festival favorite The Witch, is being tagged to direct a remake of the classic F.W. Murnau silent film, Nosferatu. The film has been remade once in 1979 by Werner Herzog. According to …
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, as much as it now stands as a cinematic phenomenon and as one of the most astonishing visual releases of the silent era, was, nevertheless, something of an enigma even in its own time.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), as in other works of F.W. Murnau and the German Expressionist movement, is a style of emotions triggered in service of light where the relationship between Movement-Image is also the same between Image-Light. The intensity of light and its relationship to form thrust Expressionistic ideas into a new era and few films exemplified this more beautifully than Sunrise. The intensity of light is measured in proportions of black versus white and brightness versus darkness. Each frame of the film becomes a physical object, an exploration of this gradation. Each frame explores the full spectrum of the gray scale, passing from the darkest shadows to a white light, evoking a true sense of the chiaroscuro. In each frame, light, framing and blocking leans towards a tendency to split the visual image along a diagonal or dentale line (See Picture 1 and 2). This visual idea communicates an idea of a rift, a growing separation between lovers and worlds
Herzog frequently manages to endow the mundane and the banal with qualities of inherent peculiarity; working specifically within the horror genre, his capacity for the uncanny is as intoxicating as ever
‘Sunrise,’ from 1927, is one of the greatest of all films. It is a touching, beautiful, and artistically accomplished movie, one of the best ever made, and unlike anything to come out of the studio system.’
Parkas, mittens and earmuffs can only do so much to starve off the imposing weight of winter. Many of us suffer, in some form or another, from seasonable depression and it’s easy to stay in bed all day instead of facing the dark and cold that comes during the winter months. Not all of us …
With the notion of film canonization once again at issue, we thought it might be an appropriate occasion to check in on our staff’s collective opinion of the greatest films of all time. We had no idea what to expect; our contributors come from all over the world and come from vastly different backgrounds and …