The Big Picture MagazineAndrea Grunert is an independent scholar (Ph.D University Paris X, with a dissertation on the films of Clint Eastwood and the American frontier) and freelance writer and lecturer in film and cultural studies. She has published widely in France and Germany. She is the editor of three books published by Charles Corlet (France): Le corps filmé (2006), L’écran des frontières (2010) and De la pauvreté (2013). Her Dictionnaire Clint Eastwood is out in French bookshops, published by Vendémiaire.
The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru), a critical portrayal of postwar corporate Japan as a breeding ground for corruption, targets the strong connections between the economy, politics and crime. As a tale of revenge, it recalls Hamlet, but it also echoes the Japanese penchant for vengeance as a dramatic motif. The famous […]
Rancher Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones) kidnaps Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), a young officer of the U.S. Border Patrol, who accidentally shot Perkins’ Mexican friend Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo) and quickly buried the body without reporting the death. The body was discovered, identified and reburied in a cemetery, but the local sheriff did not investigate […]
In 1971, Private Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell), a young British soldier from Derbyshire, arrives in Belfast with his platoon. His unit provides support for the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and while withdrawing after a mission, Gary is accidentally left behind and starts a nightmarish journey through unknown territory. In one of the first sequences of ’71, […]
The first shot in Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru shows an X-ray. A voiceover reveals that this is the stomach of Watanabe, the film’s central figure, who is terminally ill with stomach cancer. An ordinary man suddenly confronted with death and the futility of his existence, he is desperately trying to find a meaning in life. Kurosawa […]
Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi, 1948) paints a gloomy portrait of post-war Tokyo, a city in ruins where crime, corruption and barbaric behaviour abound and where people struggle against poverty, violence and tuberculosis, which was a death sentence at the time. The protagonists try to survive in a chaotic society marked by confusion and emptiness, but […]
Masaki Kobayashi’s whole oeuvre is marked by his lifelong preoccupation with the complex relationship between the individual and society, the longing for freedom, and the struggle against oppression. Both as a member of the Japanese Imperial Army (the pacifist Kobayashi was posted to Manchuria during World War II) and as an artist, the filmmaker resisted […]
A young man, head shaved, the tattoo of a swastika on his forehead, stands up abruptly and moves towards the camera as if smashing into the viewer’s face. This opening shot announces the high tension which characterises Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain, a production for Central Television. The actor’s aggressive body language is sustained by […]
In terms of film history, Snow Trail (Ginrei no hate) is worth looking at simply because it marks the screen debut of Toshirō Mifune. The unusual setting of this gangster film, directed by Senkichi Taniguchi and co-written by Akira Kurosawa, is another significant aspect. The hunt for the criminals takes place not in an urban […]
In the long opening sequence of Akira Kurosawa’s The Quiet Duel (Shizukanaru kettō), which takes place in 1944 in one of the Southeast Asian countries occupied by the Japanese, a man in a white coat is talking to another man who, dozing, leans against the wall behind them. The second man, his face hidden behind […]