[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xs111uH9ss[/youtube] 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 an interview […]
1942’s In This Our Life has become a footnote in John Huston‘s esteemed filmography. Coming after the knock-down drag-out success of his first film, The Maltese Falcon—its powerful, and historically unusual, portrayal of institutional racism is electrifying, but it is this subplot alone that garners any and all critical affection the film receives. This last, as a matter of fact, […]
What is Setting? Setting consists of three elements: places, props, and times. Visually, it’s the where, when, and what of a story, and it’s one of the most powerful aspects of mise-en-scene. The human being is all-important in the theatre. The drama on the screen can exist without actors. A banging door, a leaf in the wind, waves […]
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a film of profound emotional impact. It takes subject matter familiar to the movies—the psychosexual killer—makes it wholly its own, and it does this on the tail end of the biggest wave of cinematic Psychomania in history. Formally it is masterful in its deployment of mise-en-scene, cinematography, and sound […]
This year marks the 15th anniversary of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s cult artifact, From Dusk Till Dawn. Like everything Q.T. has put his hands on, it’s reception has been polarized, and predictably even those that have praised it couch their attaboys in meaningless platitudes about “fun” and “exploitation.” “…made to order for the stimulation […]
