“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 [...]
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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 [...]
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With a title as flamboyant as Born to Kill you’d think it was an over-the-top Wellesian exercise in gloom and doom, but the amazing thing about the movie, with one of the darkest plots in all of Film Noir, is how restrained Robert Wise remains throughout the chaos. According to Eddie Muller on the film’s [...]
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