9 December 2015 So I finally arrive for the last leg of my journey with Varda in this self portrait. I will rest here for the time being with the beautiful introspection of it; not because she has stopped working, she hasn’t, but this permits an appreciation of everything she…

You must have Pabst in your life at some point. Time it well, seek out a few silents beforehand. It was an exciting era for movies anyway, you’re going to have a lot of fun. Context will be valuable. That is because Pabst does not set out to impress on…

There’s nothing quite like being able to enter a world as it is of itself, unmediated by the niceties and formalities of having to make art. It counts for wisdom of the highest kind for me. …

There’s a great film here but you’ll have to dig down in the basement for it. I saw this a few days after The Philadelphia Story and what a contrast they make. Both incidentally take place around a house. But that one stagy, sedate wit, pleasant in the way of…

For cinema of this era I go to Pabst for ecstatic hovering out of self, the self that finds itself at the mercy of narratives; a true master that decades later filmmakers like Lynch are still tapping into the potential of what he showed is possible. Sternberg gives me feverish…

29 March 2012 I have been lately surveying silent film for two major reasons. One is looking to see cinema when it was still new, before all manner of rules and shorthands were in place. …

Two things here. You can tell that you’re in the presence of a master here; master of the spoken word, master of the whole art of presenting self, master of how to glare, when, how to pause, how to circle and grip and snarl and move back from a prey…

This really is the one that changed everything. The film is grounded in a sort of vocabulary that was new at the time, in fact I think the influence of this is much more important than Breathless. You can tell now that it’s scripted to be that way, that it’s…

Well, this is just a big piece of Capra myth. The values are admirable of course. The scope of it is appealing as is taking us inside Washington for a rare look. …