intimacy across the table—a thread
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle / Frances Ha / In The Mood For Love / Pulp Fiction / Modern Times / Nayak / Before Sunrise / Paterson / Kapurush / Hiroshima Mon Amour
Got all of two seconds into the ‘Stone Age’ first section of Buster Keaton’s first feature length film, Three Ages (1923), before having a precise & tender breakdown over how the specific desert around Los Angeles, California is just the indelible backdrop of the whole breadth and history of American film production!!! We’re just always going out to those rocks making believe!!!!!!!!!
In 1993, the New York Times published an article criticising Federico Fellini and some other foreign language films for being "hard work". MARTIN SCORSESE sent this incredible letter in response.
“It was less the animation of the moving image that originally fascinated early audiences, but the fact that such motion could be reproduced. The arrival of the Lumière Brothers’ “train of shadows,” as Maxim Gorky put it, may have caused initial consternation, but it was the subsequent replication of the event (there it is arriving in the station again, and just as before!) which drew forth warm applause, and, eventually, wild cheering. Suddenly time could be regained, relived – moments were no longer lost, but preserved forever, retrieved through a kind of mechanical memory. Small wonder, then, that so much nineteenth-century writing on cinema has a strange supernatural flavour. The past (and the dead) live on, but in a soundless spectral realm, both awful (in the original sense of the word) and idealized, a focus of nostalgia and exile.”
excerpt from Bilton, Alan. “Buster Keaton and the South: First Things and Last.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 491, 2006.
“A good movie makes you want to rewatch it for sheer entertainment. A great movie makes you want to revisit it because it recharges some basic part of you that may be running low.”
Every time you see this guy, you know it’s about to be a good time
Lantern slides showing movie theater etiquette and announcements, circa 1912.
Excellent podcast etiquette for today as well, IOHO. Please, applaud with hands only as you listen to our latest.
