The Forgotten: Throttled
David CairnsThere are two, closely related, yet mutually exclusive mysteries, regarding the output of Keystone, Mack Sennett's comedy factory of the silent age. The first mystery assumes that the films
The Forgotten
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The Forgotten: The Merry Landru
David CairnsIt was inevitable that Chabrol, "the French Hitchcock," to allow for a moment that utterly inaccurate sobriquet, would at some point tackle the most famous of French murderers, the real-life Bluebeard
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The Forgotten: Naughty Nineties
David Cairns"He's a chin." Such was Josef von Sternberg's summation of Clive Brook, delivered when Marlene Dietrich asked what her leading man in Shanghai Express (1932) was like. Since Brook had already given a
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The Forgotten: Festen
David Cairns"One theory is, it goes back to the days when they were making the calendar. They put in the extra days between the lunar and the solar year, and when they put them in, they felt they were queer sort
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The Forgotten: From Life
David CairnsOver at Shadowplay, I'm hosting a little blogathon on "late films," but it was coincidence that found me screening a fan-subtitled, from-VHS copy of Les amants de Montparnasse (a.k.a. Montparnasse
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The Forgotten: Doug Tamer
David CairnsThe Taming of the Shrew (1929) has a pretty poor reputation, being a late gasp of two silent mega-stars, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, in the early talkie era. If it's celebrated for anything
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The Forgotten: After London
David CairnsIn the dying years of the last century, Patrick Keiller was Britain's leading cinematic psychogeographer, mapping the unconscious impulses of the English cityscape in two remarkable feature films, London
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The Forgotten: Street of Dreams
David CairnsProduction stills have played a large and peculiar role in my movie-watching life. Seeing a haunting image from some unfamiliar film can set me off into reveries, and make me crave the opportunity to
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The Forgotten: Retour a la vie
David CairnsPierre Étaix is back! The writer-director-star, a disciple of Tati but very much his own clown, has been released from a kind of purgatory.
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The Forgotten: Open-Plan Dovecot Required
David CairnsPigeon-holes are terribly useful things, it seems. Film-makers who can't be shoehorned into one or the other have a way of falling down the cracks. Now, that is a pretty awesomely mixed bunch of metaphors
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The Forgotten: "And darkness was on the face of the deep."
David Cairns"I really am looking for absolution for all the things I had to do for money's sake." Edgar G. Ulmer said that, to Peter Bogdanovich. Everything about Ulmer's last film, The Cavern (1965), speaks of
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The Forgotten: An Empty Room and the Right Kind of People
David CairnsJan Švankmajer seems to have entered that slightly awkward phase of the arthouse auteur's career where he's apt to be underappreciated. The critics have already said all the obvious things about him