I was delighted to sponsor Kennington Bioscope’s screening of E A Dupont’s 1928 silent masteriece, MOULIN ROUGE at The Cinema Museum in Kennington on Wednesday 11 December.
“Anton Walbrook is captivating in his unbridled performance style and his total espousal of an old-school, self-destructive and tragic protagonist. But there is something more, too. Walbrook was one of those great film actors who made full and courageous use in his work of his essential otherness (he was an Austrian Jewish homosexual working in a foreign country and language). Although a classically trained actor, in nearly all his memorable English-language performances—but most notably Gaslight (1940)—he drew explicitly on his alien heritage (most obviously represented by his Germanic baritone voice and clipped diction) while in The Queen of Spades he appears to invite the audience to side against him for subconscious reasons other than what he says and what he does.”
Anton Walbrook and Edith Evans are magnificent in this lavish, hallucinatory film. You can read my treatment of it as part of Reverse Shot’s annual Halloween round-up, the Great Pumpkins - here
I was thrilled to guest curate a weekend of films at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY, celebrating the popular cinema of French-Armenian director Henri Verneuil. Stunts by Jean-Paul Belmondo, dialogues by Michel Audiard, music by Ennio Morricone and Georges Delerue. Fun in the sun!
Many thanks to the excellent Eric Hynes, Curator of Film at MOMI, for this amazing opportunity.
“An apparent ingénue and flibbertigibbet, she is flighty, reckless, preyed upon, and vulnerable, but so utterly mesmeric—and, it must be said, manipulative—as to drive all the principal men in the film literally mad. Quentin commits suicide; Paulot and Scrutzler have a long fight in the rain; Paulot’s own descent into madness takes the form of an attempted lurch into machismo, followed by a corrective retreat into childhood pain and fear.”
I wrote about Juliette Binoche’s gobsmacking debut in Andre Techine’s (and Olivier Assayas’s) RENDEZ-VOUS over at Reverse Shot
I enjoyed my transatlantic interview with Violet Lucca for the Film Comment Christmas podcast of 2016 - discussing the origins of ghost stories at Christmas and especially M R James.
You can listen to the podcast here
M R James ( 1862-1936)
I was delighted to take part last April in the Curzon Cinemas podcast on the subject of Robin Campillo’s masterful BPM: Beats per minute. You can listen to the podcast here.