Coosa Creek Mambo

Nobody was better at composing for the 4:3 frame than Akira Kurosawa. Like many of the directors of the day, he routinely used normal to slightly wide lenses; with the advent of widescreen, he abandoned them in favor of telephotos, and rarely looked back.
Here’s a scene from Ikiru (1952) that illustrates. The protagonist [...]

In 1939, The Rules of the Game was such a failure with the French public that they threw chairs at the screen and set newspapers alight in the theaters. It wasn’t much more popular with critics, and in 1940, director Jean Renoir fled Paris to make films abroad. He ended up in — [...]

Tags: French Cancan, Gabin, Renoir

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Here’s one more clip from Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932). Unlike the indoor tracking shot from yesterday’s post, it’s a pan (i.e., the camera remains still and rotates around its vertical axis). It takes place near the beginning of the movie as [...]

Tags: Boudu Saved From Drowning, Renoir

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Those who’ve read this blog before (and you know who you are!) will know that I’ve made a case for Jean Renoir being perhaps the greatest director of all time. As Peter Bogdanovich has noted, during the 1930s he made a virtually unprecedented [...]

Tags: Boudu Saved From Drowning, Renoir, tracking shot

So I was rooting around on IMDB the other day, and I came to Akira Kurosawa’s page, and here’s what I saw under “Director”:

Gendai no No (2010) (filming)

And I thought: You can’t fool me . . . Kurosawa’s been dead for years. Must be one of IMDB’s legendary mistakes. Just for yucks, I pressed the [...]

If you were asked what director had the most consistent, immediately recognizable style, what would you say? Although that sort of thing is hard to quantify, you’d be safe if you answered Yashujiro Ozu (right), the director of an astonishing 54 films over his 36-year career. He’s known for a style so minimalist as to [...]

Tags: Ozu, Tokyo Story

Peter Bogdanovich has a great appreciation for Jean Renoir over at the New York Observer. He regards Renoir as “The Best Director, Ever,” and who am I to argue? He writes:
“In the 1950s, the Young Turks of the French New Wave—Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, etc.—acclaimed Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock but reserved the [...]

Tags: Grand Illusion, Jean Renoir, Rules of the Game

What can I say about Jean Renoir? In my humble opinion, he is perhaps the best that ever was, if you discount, Kurosawa or Fellini or Bergman or . . . ok, ok, so I’m not ready to pronounce him the greatest, but based on his output before 1940, he’d have to be [...]

Tags: Gabin, La Bete Humaine, Renoir, Simone Simon

Note: This is part of the Invitation to the Dance Blogathon at Ferdy on Films.
To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a dance is just a dance . . . but sometimes it’s not. And among the more entertaining celluloid examples of when it’s not are by Federico Fellini. Actually, Freud doesn’t quite fit — [...]

Tags: Dance, Fellini, La Dolce Vita, Nights of Cabiria

What is there left to say about Federico Fellini? Possibly not much, but folks keep on trying. Several months ago I vowed … simply vowed … to visit all of his first movies, up through 8½, and then write some (possibly redundant) but hopefully interesting stuff about them. I thought I’d churn [...]