Consider how The Silence of the Lambs revolves around vision. Not only perception, but empathy and hindsight, and the non-empirical prick of intuition, where vision exceeds the reach of training.
PositionEditor-at-Large; Podcast Co-Host
JoinedSeptember 15, 2017
Articles24
Veronica Fitzpatrick teaches film studies at Brown University and co-hosts The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast. She lives in Providence, RI.
Throughout May December, graduation (as event, as trope; moving from one degree to the next, successful completion, training) competes with maturation for best overall conceit; each is more than window dressing to the present drama of Elizabeth’s unwelcome investigations. What Todd Haynes builds is less a trick mirror than a kaleidoscope, to refract a thought in all directions.
The final installment of BWDR at NYFF 61, with thoughts and reflections on Priscilla (Coppola), Last Summer (Breillat), and Ferrari (Mann).
Whenever I see a bunch of films in a condensed period, my notes run conspiratorial: an inventory of the weird resonances that link one to another, beats that reflect my taste in selection as much as any semblance of collective consciousness.
For months I’ve been thinking about sequels and second chances, about Paul Newman but also, increasingly, Tom Cruise.
With erotic thrillers, the likelihood of astonishment runs parallel to the assurance of knowing precisely what you’ll get: intrigue, infidelity, conspiracy, obsession, doubles, misdirection, insatiable corruption and corrupting insatiability.
Given the show’s explicit judgment of judgment, it’s perplexing that many critiques, warranted as they are, overwhelmingly rely on and perpetuate a neurotic suspicion of pleasure.
It may be that with its real locations, non-professional performers, and documentary-style cinematography of the city surrounds, People on Sunday presages aspects of both Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. but it’s also a film about presaging.
What we commend as “real” in life as in film, and perhaps in Scorsese’s films in particular, we might call gritty, dark, or uncompromising; The Age of Innocence proposes otherwise. What could be more violent than a life sculpted by compromise?
If this is a list, let it be a syllabus, a series of entry points joined by common questions: What does it look and sound like to understand your life, previously envisioned as exclusively “ahead,” as incrementally, but increasingly, behind? What can a moment of emotional accuracy accomplish? What imperative pleasures does meticulousness afford?
Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar is so rigorously, comprehensively excessive, its excesses eclipse any baseline against which excess is typically judged.
For all of A New Leaf's atonal humor and surrealism, Elaine May still manages to depict marriage in a bleakly true light: as a continual, if cordial, blind date.