-
The Turn of the Screw
The aesthetics of the ghost story and of horror in general are essentially those of the Symbolist movement that spanned the 19th and the 20th centuries. Phenomena that are perceived by the senses, say the sight of a ghost or the sound of a raven tapping on the chamber door, intimate the existence of a…
-
Anna Karenina
I saw Joe Wright’s ANNA KARENINA a while ago and didn’t know what to think about it. This is not to say that I did not have feelings, thoughts, and sensations while watching it, that some of those were positive and some not, nor that I was not glad to have seen it (I was)…
-
On the Road
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was a literary rush when I read it sometime in the 1980s, the perfect expression of a sort of counter-mythology to the mainstream myth of the American Dream. The Dream myth holds that we can do anything we want in this country, choose our professions, attain wealth, and build families,…
-
Paul Auster
New York has a lot of national centers and institutes whose programming I follow, but FIAF (French Institute Alliance Français) may have the most interesting and provocative. I say that as someone whose second language, such as it is, is Spanish, and who knows French only insofar as it resembles that other Romance language, or…
-
Wuthering Heights
One of the clearer processes of action and reaction in cultural history was that Romanticism reacted against Neo-Classicism, that Naturalism reacted in turn against Romanticism, and that, in a somewhat minor aftershock, Aestheticism recoiled from Naturalism. Amongst the many remarkable things about the new film of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is that it brings the…
-
Trishna
Michael Winterbottom’s TRISHNA is sumptuous. It adapts Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles to a contemporary Indian setting and in the process retains the essential beauty of the tragedy while stripping from it the nostalgia and romanticism to which period filmmaking is prone. The past is everywhere in the images – the colonial edifices, the…
-
The Select
I have always had mixed feelings about the Hemingway ouvre, but The Sun Also Rises has the special virtue of being perfect. It is one of those novels – Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is another – that uses an anecdote involving a small number of characters to distill the essence of an historical moment. So I was…
-
Age of Consent • The Tempest
I came to Norman Lindsay’s witty, wise and wily novel AGE OF CONSENT through the effervescent film of the same name that the great Michael Powell directed in 1969. Some have spotted a connection to Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the plot, which concerns a painter struggling to find inspiration on an isolated Australian isle accompanied…
-
The American • Up in the Air
Seeing THE AMERICAN made me read the book on which it is based. Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman turned out to be a passable thriller that has its moments but pales in comparison to the film. The movie is a taut, perfectly paced and morally ambiguous character study that, by making the central figure…
-
The City of Your Final Destination
THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION is the first Merchant Ivory film to be released without the involvement of the late Ismail Merchant. Cinephiles have not always favored the determinedly literary and so, the argument goes, un-cinematic Merchant-Ivory franchise (James Ivory being its other half), but I have usually found the bookish pace engrossing and…