You can only get the Suspense element going by giving the audience information.—Alfred Hitchcock
Suspense, Hitch always insisted, was fundamentally different from Mystery. Because the press so often mislabeled his movies as Mysteries, he took more than one occasion to get specific about the difference. The most famous of these was in [...]
Continue Reading →
“Cinema is Montage.”—Sergei Eisenstein
While cinema was still only a toddler in the artworld, Sergei Eisenstein wrote several essays on his seminal theoretical concern: Montage Theory, and while he wasn’t the first to write about montage—Kuleshov had demonstrated his “effect” by at least 1921 and Pudovkin wrote about it in the mid-20s—Eisenstein’s definition of montage [...]
Continue Reading →
The 2011 Cannes Film Festival is happening this week, and I wanted to give you a glimpse of Brian De Palma’s surreal 2001 Cannes Film Festival set-piece in Femme Fatale. This was the same Cannes where David Lynch won the Prix de la mise en scène [best director] for that year’s other Sapphically charged Noir dreamscape—Mulholland [...]
Continue Reading →