When Eric Rohmer entered a space with his camera, whether it was a Parisian apartment or a beach or a forest, he somehow managed to enlarge that space into an environment that shimmered and tingled with a kind of spiritual, almost supernatural presence (his only antecedent in this spooky regard was Murnau). He must have had his technical tricks and preferences, but I don't think it comes down to what lenses he used, or whatever stratagems he devised to capture natural light, or even the people he picked to be in his films, almost all of whom had a natural grace. Rohmer had an ineffable way of looking at his educated men and women as they talked and talked themselves in circles, making plans and describing their own feelings and sensations after the fact until we forget what action they were planning to take and lose ourselves in a kind of heightened inertia. All the while, Rohmer watched over them like a forgiving but sometimes judgmental God.
The House Next Door
Posts Tagged: The L Magazine
Tales Well Told: Eric Rohmer, 1920 – 2010
by Dan Callahan on January 12th, 2010 at 5:50 pm in Film
Urban Fable: The Message(s) of On the Waterfront
by Matt Zoller Seitz on October 9th, 2009 at 10:36 am in Film
The 1954 drama On the Waterfront kicks off Film Forum's Elia Kazan series, running Oct. 9-29.
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On the Waterfront is a masterpiece with an asterisk. The asterisk refers to the film's storyline. It's widely described as a self-justification by artists who gave the names of suspected Communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee during the witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The most prominent of the informers was On the Waterfront's director, Elia Kazan.
In 1952, Kazan, already a famous and influential theater and film director, was pressured by HUAC to supply the names of colleagues suspected of Communist affiliation. After previously refusing to cooperate, Kazan eventually caved in and named names. From the instant he cooperated, Kazan's legacy was tarnished, and in some quarters negated, by his stool pigeon status. Though he expressed ambivalence and even outright remorse, he never officially apologized for the damage he inflicted. And he sometimes defended himself on the grounds that the American Communist Party's defense of Stalinist Russia's brutality was a greater sin than his decision to inform.
It seems strangely fitting, then, that On the Waterfront would prove to be Kazan's most compelling and durable film.
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To view the essay on The L Magazine's web site, click here. To read an expanded transcript of the essay's narration, click here.
Rock 'n' roll High School: Freaks and Geeks
by Matt Zoller Seitz on September 25th, 2009 at 5:46 am in Television
Florescent lights. Combination locks. Clueless parents. Clueless teachers. Clueless friends. Paranoia. Alienation. Hormones. Zits.
These are but a few selling points of the NBC series Freaks and Geeks, which debuted September 25, 1999. Set at a white suburban high school circa 1981 and devised by men who knew the territory, creator Paul Feig and executive producer Judd Apatow, it was hailed by critics as one of that season's freshest new series. It lingered in the basement of the Nielsen ratings for 18 episodes, less than a full season, until the network, which never really knew what to do with it, finally pulled the plug.
In retrospect, it seems a minor miracle that the series lasted as long as it did, since its stock in trade was honesty. And when the subject is adolescence, a period that grows rosy in the memory but sucks ass when you're actually living through it, honesty isn't much of a selling point. Mass audiences are only interested in reliving high school if it's sentimentalized. The chance to revisit something remotely in the ballpark of the real thing is as appetizing as cafeteria food—and Freaks and Geeks was a weekly feast of teen awkwardness.
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To view the video essay on The L Magazine's website, click here. To read a transcript of the narration, click here.
Bad Seeds: A History of Creepy Kids on Film
by staff on August 3rd, 2009 at 12:03 pm in Film
By Nicolas Rapold and Matt Zoller Seitz
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Nicolas Rapold is a critic for The L Magazine, where House founder Matt Zoller Seitz makes video essays. To view the video essay on the magazine's site, click here.
The Cinephile Hunt on YouTube and Beyond
by Dan Callahan on May 20th, 2009 at 9:10 pm in Film
By Dan Callahan
Like most people, I assume, I've generally watched YouTube in dribs and drabs. I would type in a name and see what turned up under, say, Anita O'Day, or Katharine Hepburn, or Bruce Springsteen. It was only when I was commissioned by the Sydney Film Festival to write a piece about Deborah Kerr that I began to discover just how useful YouTube could be as a resource for hard-to-see films. I typed in "Deborah Kerr," and was surprised to see entire Kerr movies on the site: Hatter's Castle (1941), an early British film she made with James Mason, and The Proud and Profane (1956), a key Kerr picture that goes much further with the sexuality she only hinted at in From Here to Eternity. Most importantly, a Kerr fan had uploaded several of her television movies from the eighties, like Reunion at Fairborough (1985), which re-united her with her best co-star, Robert Mitchum, and even her last feature film, a modest vehicle called The Assam Garden (1985), which I'm not sure ever got a proper release in America.
To read the rest of the article at the L Magazine, click here.
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