Light Sleeper. 1.

For several months now, Saul Symonds, a young film critic in Sydney who's written for the likes of The Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, has quietly been working on a vital and vivacious new online publication, Light Sleeper. Right off, you'll see it's divided into two major sections, "Recent Cinema" on the left, where you can familiarize yourself with Symonds's smooth prose and smarts (did you realize Garry Marshall's got a thing for feet?), and on the right, "Past, Classic, Cult & Obscure Cinema."

For all the sharp insight of Symonds's reviews of the new, it's over here on the right where you can sense his passion for and dedication to cinema. Among the many highlights:

• Two extraordinary reprints: "Obscure Objects of Desire: A Jam Session on Non-Narrative," a "critical round-robin," as Jonathan Rosenbaum calls it in a new preface to his conversation with Raymond Durgnat and David Ehrenstein, and Gideon Bachmann on "Pasolini and the Marquis de Sade."

• Ronald Bergan's disheartening encounter with Anita Ekberg: "It was best to close one's eyes and picture oneself, like Marcello, lost in the waters of the Trevi Fountain and her embrace."

• Peter Cowie: "No Nordic director since Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller has communicated the influence of Nature on human lives so profoundly as Rauni Mollberg has done in his feature films."

• Bill Krohn on Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, Gus Van Sant's Elephant and Vadim Perelman's House of Sand and Fog.

• Symonds on Luigi Batzella's S.S. Hell Camp, Bresson's Mouchette and Coppola's workprint for Apocalypse Now (no, not Redux, the workprint).

And that's just scratching the surface.

Posted by dwhudson at April 17, 2005 4:18 AM