Jacques Kapralik (1906 - 1960)

Kapralik's illustration for The Philadelphia Story (1940).

Those of you who regularly follow David Bordwell's blog will have already caught up with his latest

post about an unidentified artist who during the 1940s made stylish, elaborate tableaux to promote some top MGM productions. These peculiar works are made with cutout figures of the actors involved and 3D objects as well, creating a nice contrast between the flatness of the formers and the depth of the latters. 

Given that the artist's signature is a "K", I guess we are dealing with the work of Jacques Kapralik, a well-known Romanian caricaturist born in Bucharest in 1906 and emigrated to the US in 1936. In the internet you can find excellent material on the subject; film critic Leonard Maltin even dedicated an article to Kapralik's artistry and career. (Since a copyright infringement is last on my list of priorities, the image above comes straight from Bordwell's blog; it is a scan from an edition of the Hollywood Reporter.)

Chromatic shocks, or the unexpected virtue of black-and-white inserts

What do Disney's 1951 extravagant rendition of Alice in Wonderland and Quentin Tarantino's martial-arts flick Kill Bill have in common? As you'll have guessed, it involves a particular use of black and white. To my knowledge, no other movie has employed it this way – if you know more examples, please let me know. So let's see what it is and why it is so peculiar.

Adieu au Langage: A shamelessly self-celebratory update

Well, apparently I'm not talking nonsense all the time: writer/translator/director Ted Fendt has updated his in-progress list of works cited in Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au Langage on his MUBI page, adding my conjecture about the now-famous movie's epigraph, "Those lacking in imagination take refuge in reality".

My guess is that the phrase may have been suggested to Godard by an article from "Le Monde" written by French author Marie Darrieussecq. Here you can find my original post on the film, and here is (*Serious-Film-Critic Alert*) Ted's film blog.

A most innocuous enfant terrible: Mommy (Xavier Dolan, 2014)

Like a big Chekhov's gun with the price tag still attached inevitably destined to go off in the final act — no real spoiler here — a sci-fi premise opens Xavier Dolan's latest film: in the year 2015, a superimposed text informs, a Canadian law is enacted that allows parents of mentally ill children to give them in full and irreversible custody to the state's health care system. This not only gives us a rather precise idea about where the story is going to end, but also speaks volumes about how superficial is going to be Dolan's approach to mental illness. Because how blinkered you have to be to ignore how inadequately, to put it mildly, institutions have treated and still treat psychiatric disorders in most societies, and to even make a futuristic preamble out of a burning social problem. The longstanding issue of whether psychiatric patients should be taken care of by the government or the family has no simple solution; involuntary seclusion, and I'm not complaining, is still applied when they threaten other people's safety or their own, with great sadness on the part of the families and those involved. By just setting his movie in the present day Mr. Dolan would have had as much tragedy as he liked.

A tough subject: Wit (Mike Nichols, 2001)

Forget about the morbid adolescents of Restless, the cheesy bromance of 50/50, and even the well-off academics of The Barbarian Invasions. Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson and directed by Mike Nichols in 2001, Wit stars Emma Thompson as an unmarried English literature scholar diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer who realizes that all she can count on are her sharp intellect and the metaphysical poems of John Donne.

Metaphors and other toys: Adieu au Langage (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)

There's so much to say about Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au Langage — a movie that's too deliberately cryptic (some would say irritating) to be taken completely seriously, and at the same time too intelligent to be dismissed as a simple divertissement from an octogenarian director who had already secured himself a place in the annals of cinema 50 years ago. The risk is to get lost amidst nebulous conjectures about the story, or succumb to the temptation to summarize in a single sentence the message it supposedly conveys. I'll try to avoid both approaches, focusing instead on some of the questions that occurred to me after the viewing.

Two films from the Balkans: Zakloni (Ivan Salatić, Montenegro, 2014) and Okean (Tamara Drakulić, Serbia, 2014)

Picture courtesy of Ivan Salatić.

The 32nd edition of the Turin Film Festival, an annual event that is as old as this blogger, ran in my hometown from November 21 to 29. This year the festival offered a rich selection of American movies of the 70s, so I had the opportunity to catch up with little-seen films like the irresistibly funny Taking Off (1971), which was Czech director Miloš Forman's foray into Hollywood, as well as renowned ones, like Sydney Pollack's paranoia-drenched Three Days of the Condor (1975), for which I've miraculously managed to stay away from spoilers for 32 years. Among the films in competition I saw the short feature film Zakloni (Shelters) by Ivan Salatić from Montenegro, in combination with Okean (Ocean) by Serbian director Tamara Drakulić; I give a brief account of the screenings in the following.

The horror of choice: Woman in the Dunes(Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)

The ant-lion, also known as doodlebug, is a tiny predatory insect that digs little pits in the sand, then hides at the bottom waiting for preys, typically ants, to fall in. When this happens, the sides of the pit start to collapse, dragging the ant down toward its doom. If you are wondering why I'm telling you this, you probably haven't seen Woman in the Dunes.

Confusion is sexy: Under The Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

Jean-Luc Godard once said that every movie is ultimately a documentary about its actors. This is particularly true of Under The Skin, Jonathan Glazer's first effort in ten years. In fact, despite most reviews describing it as a sci-fi film about an unnamed alien, actually the protagonist does have a name: it's Scarlett Johansson.

Coming full circle: The Broken Circle Breakdown(Felix Van Groeningen, 2012)

Unfairly overshadowed by Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza in the foreign-language film category at the 2014 Oscars, this remarkable movie from Belgium reminds us that heavy subjects don't necessarily make heavy movies. There are many ways a filmmaker can engage us emotionally without appealing to our most basic Pavlovian instincts.