Perhaps in another universe “Cynthia, Dorothy, and Jane are marching side-by-side somewhere, dressed chicly, placards raised, fighting for the freedom to do their work.”
Dorothy Arzner and Jill Craigie’s Working Girls
K-drama Comfort in Trying Times
“Art has a way of saving lives. Whether you’re creating it as a means to expel a difficulty or inhaling it as a way to survive one, it fills in those internal spaces that reason just can’t reach.”
Noir as Societal Mirror: Julien Duvivier’s PANIQUE
“And unfortunately, in our strange and uncertain times, maybe a brutal “it can happen here” wake-up call is what we need.”
Entertainment-wise, a motherfucker
Entertainment-wise, a motherfucker: critical race politics and the transnational movement of Melvin van Peebles
Rossellini’s War Trilogy
Rossellni never looks away. He never flinches. But he never misses an opportunity to celebrate what’s good in humanity either.
American Mythologies: Frank Capra Values
“The art of Frank Capra is very, very simple: It’s the love of people. Add two simple ideals to this love of people: the freedom of each individual, and the equal importance of each individual, and you have the principle upon which I based all my films.”
He Who Strikes First, Hits Twice: The Urgent Cinema of Santiago Álvarez
“Álvarez’s work … was a shining example of a poverty row aesthetic forged from necessity. His films were … an example of “urgent cinema”, keyed to raising public consciousness about current issues such as racism, housing conditions and police brutality in various parts of the world.”
Mind Your Manners: I Am Cuba
“As a form of resistance to the unblinking long take, Maria smashes her eyelids tightly shut, inhabiting her own privacy for the first time that night.”
Bang Bang: Saute ma ville
A wonderful essay on Chantal Ackerman’s first film Saute ma ville by film critic Adrian Martin.
L’opéra-Mouffe by Agnes Varda
The film is like a poem of a dream, composed in movements, and alternating between scenes of blissful young lovers naked in bed, surreal and frightening images that serve as worrying metaphors for pregnancy, and documentary footage of people on the Rue Mouffetard. In 17 minutes the film covers the cycle of life — childhood, youth, old age, infirmity, death — but in not in any logical order, rather in the bewildering way that life moves or that we move through life.
magpiesmagazine.com 