Senses of Cinema. 43.

Here's an issue of Senses of Cinema you can actually wrap your head around. Seven features, spotlights on Robert Bresson and Alfred Hitchcock and editors Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray even spot a motif running throughout: a mutual affinity between painters and filmmakers. There's a thematic sub-thread as well, though it's not too far removed, "the film-literature axis."

Because he happens to be in Berlin tonight, talking about Rossellini, let's begin by pointing to the two pieces by Tag Gallagher, the first a lushly illustrated consideration of the push-pull dialogue between Pedro Costa and Straub-Huillet, the second, similarly, on King Vidor and Andrew Wyeth.

Wheeler Winston Dixon brings fresh insight into the film vs digital debate; hindsight, you might even call it, since we are witnessing the "Last Days of Film."

Damon Smith talks at length with Andrew Bujalski about Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation.

Adam Schofield examines the ways Juraj Herz's The Cremator "elicits psychological horror through its disorienting cinematography," how it "reflects trends in Nazi propaganda" and "the much-overlooked indirectly subversive Aesopian messages pertaining to communism that the film directed towards Czechoslovakian audiences of the late 1960s."

Matilda Mroz on Man of Marble: "Wajda's film not only thematises the fracturing of a spatial homogenisation and subjective repression in [filmmaker] Agnieszka's investigation of the régime's manipulations, but also enacts a dynamic implosion of these façades through disassembling a deceptively cohesive way of seeing and experiencing cinematic space, and resurrecting the visceral potentiality of figures on the screen."

"Ridley Scott's Blade Runner opened 25 years ago to scornful critics and a disappointed public confronted by a moody, violent and densely layered science fiction film governed by existential themes and Marxist tendencies," begins David C Ryan. "Unlike any other effort in recent cinematic history, the critical recovery of Blade Runner has been a long and intense affair." History follows.

Four on Bresson:

• "Robert Bresson began as a painter and, while he would rarely practice the art, it was a guiding force in the development of his unique film style," writes Peter L Doebler. "While Cézanne was the one who showed Bresson painting was over, I believe he was also a key influence on the shape that Bresson's film style took."

• "Outside of the more obvious source influences of Georges Bernanos, Fyodor Dostoevsky or Leo Tolstoy, the work of Flannery O'Connor may provide the nearest analogical relation yet," suggests Guy Crucianelli. "From notions of 'Christian misanthropy' to statements on form by both O'Connor and Bresson, the parallels between the criticism and the work are strikingly consistent."

• Noel Vera on Diary of a Country Priest: "Bresson at an early point of his career - using the Georges Bernanos novel - seems to be telling us that to present matters indefinite (the spirit, or soul) you need for material matters definite (the body, the world it lives in); more, to break free of the world of the physical you must first take a firmer hold on said world – for traction, if you like."

• With his "Dissenting View," Dan Harper throws down the gauntlet, calling out J Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum by name. "In effect, Bresson is anti-modernist, which is why it is so surprising to find him being praised most highly by critics who wear their politics (always Leftist, of course) on their sleeves."

Three on Hitchcock:

• "The ability of any director lies less in the 'borrowed' but how the borrowings are creatively applied within any particular cultural transformation having little in common with the original source material," writes Tony Williams. "As Hitchcock told François Truffaut, John Buchan 'was a strong influence a long time' before he filmed The 39 Steps in 1935."

• John Orr: "In my recent book, Hitchcock and 20th Century Cinema, I made an outrageously general argument for the affinity between Alfred Hitchcock's narratives and David Hume's reasoning about human nature.... But my impulse since the book's appearance has not been to feel I exaggerated - which I'm sure I did - but to sense that I did not go far enough."

• Richard Franklin looks into what might have kept Hitchcock from making a proposed adaptation of Henry Cecil's No Bail for the Judge; had it been realized, "the history of the motion picture, certainly the thriller genre and even that most memorable of decades, the 1960s, might all have been different."

DVD reviews: Peter Hourigan on Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist, Michael Campi on Four Studies by Mikio Naruse and Maximilian Le Cain on a 6-film Luc Moullet boxset.

Then there are six festival reports, seven book reviews, 15 new additions to the collection of Cinémathèque Annotations on Film and two new names added to the Great Directors critical database: Derek Jarman and Len Lye.

Posted by dwhudson at May 12, 2007 7:27 AM