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The Past, Present, and Future of Real-Time Films Part Four

THE DIGITAL ERA: REAL-TIME FILMS FROM 2000 TO TODAY 40 years before, in 1960, lighter cameras enabled a cinéma vérité-flavored revolution in street realism. By 2000, new digital cameras suggested a whole new set of promises, including telling stories that would have been unimaginable within minimum budgets for features even ten years before. In 2000, …

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The Past, Present, and Future of Real-Time Films Part Three

THE POST-1960S, PRE-DIGITAL AGE: REAL-TIME ONE-OFFS, 1975-1998 British filmmaker John Byrum is responsible for the first (and in some ways only) real-time period film. Inserts (1975), set in the early 1930s, is about a Boy Wonder movie director (called Boy Wonder, played by Richard Dreyfuss fresh from American Graffiti (1973) and Jaws (1975)) now washed …

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The Past, Present, and Future of Real-Time Films Part Two

SIDNEY AND THE SIXTIES: REAL-TIME 1957-1966 Throughout the 1950s, Hollywood’s relationship with television was fraught: TV was a hated rival but also a source of cheap talent and material, as in the case of the small-scale Marty (1955), which won the Best Picture Oscar. These contradictions were well represented by the apparently “televisual” 12 Angry …

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‘Last Year at Marienbad’ constructs a romance from lost memories

Where Alain Resnais’ first film, Hiroshima mon amour, was the unconventional story of two people haunted by the imagery of a distant war, his follow-up, Last Year at Marienbad, expanded upon the themes of troubled memory and the imagined past in a convoluted series of conversation and flashbacks between a woman and two men, all unnamed. Famous for its confounding narrative structure, the film excels at making truth and fiction indistinguishable. Its surreal, dream-like nature is at once fascinating and baffling, prompting some to call the film a masterpiece and others incomprehensible. Encompassing all the passion and pain of a love triangle and the intrigue of a mystery, Last Year at Marienbad maintains its outwardly staid atmosphere throughout to haunting effect.

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