To wrap up her gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe explained away her supernatural trappings at the conclusion. Imagine a story that explains away its action in every scene. Hitchcock was heavy-handed when diagnosing Norman Bates and unmasking his own mystery; Nolan extends what the master of suspense couldn’t pull off in one scene. Sisyphean from the drawing ... read more »

Like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Serbian–born Slavko Vorkapich (1894-1976) was not only a filmmaker, but a respected film theorist, and like those two Soviet giants, Vorkapich’s theories were mainly about editing – the right and wrong ways to cut two shots together, the “kinesthetic” (physical) effects that could be produced in the viewer through ... read more »

La Belle Captive (1983) is an erotic noir mystery by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad. It is also quite tongue-in-cheek. The following three images which appear in succession in the film capture something of the movie’s fetishistic flavor. If the last shot reminds you of the orgy sequence in Kubrick’s Eyes ... read more »

Everybody knows the music Maurice Jarre wrote for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago (“Lara’s Theme”). Much less well known are the scores he wrote before Lawrence – including one of Alain Resnais’s first short subjects (Toute la Memoire du Monde, 1956), and the short films and, later, features of French poetic surrealist, Georges Franju. ... read more »

Dave McKean’s MirrorMask (above) and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth were released within a year of each other. Both are women-in-wonderland tales. Pan’s Labyrinth is about a little girl who flees from her evil Spanish-fascist stepfather into a woodsy fairyland. MirrorMask is about a ‘tween with a dying mom who enters a dream world in ... read more »

There was Alice, who journeyed to Wonderland and through the looking glass, Dorothy Gale, who was carried on a cyclone to Oz, and Wendy Darling, who accompanied lost boy Peter Pan to Neverland. All three meet as adult women in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s X-rated graphic novel, Lost Girls (above). Moore, the genius author ... read more »

Canadian Guy Maddin is virtually unique among contemporary filmmakers in that despite having made nine features – including The Saddest Music in the World, Brand Upon the Brain, and My Winnipeg – he continues to churn out film shorts. Dozens of them. As he notes in this great interview, “I put all my shorts on ... read more »