On a little island in the Canaries with very rocky terrain that in times past made communication very difficult in the absence of modern day technology, the locals invented a whistling language, a whistled version of Spanish, “El Silbo”, that is still being used today. That was the idea where Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest film originated. […]
Tag: Hitchcock
On Location: London
To coincide with the London Film Festal 2014 The Big Picture is casting its eye back through London’s rich cinematic history, to explore some the films that have been set and shot in this iconic city. The following films have been selected from World Film Locations: London (edited by Neil Mitchell). The Blue Lamp (Basil […]
The death of Babs Milligan (Anna Massey) at the hands of Neck Tie Murderer Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) in Hitchcock’s Frenzy is arguably the Master of Suspense’s last great sequence. And it’s all the more effectively chilling for its relative restraint. About half an hour earlier in the film we had been witness to the […]
Stoker is a film replete with significance and meaning imposed on the positioning of its characters within the frame. A scene on a winding staircase at around 12 minutes neatly captures the moment when a crucial shift in power between India (Mia Wasikowska) and Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) occurs. Louis Giannetti, in his hardy perennial film […]
Picture this: it’s been a long day and you’ve been driving since early morning. Suddenly, just off the highway, you notice a motel and decide to stop for the night. After booking in and passing the time of day with the young owner (he seems a little odd but, as he’s alone, it would be […]
Architecture, like film, acts at many scales. Suspense cinema in particular exploits this superbly, beginning with the smallest – the room. The four walls which surround us for most of the day are our world for those hours. But as much as they are just walls, they are also screens on which we project our […]
To qualify as a Big Picture ‘lost classic’ a movie usually has to have been grossly underwatched due to the lack of a video or DVD release, criminally overlooked by TV schedulers or (uncriminally?) not uploaded to video sharing websites. In the case of Thorold Dickinson’s Victorian psychological melodrama Gaslight (1940) its lost status was […]
Few men have influenced graphic design as drastically as Saul Bass, the New York-born artist who was responsible for some of that era’s most iconic movie posters. Nicholas Page takes a look at his most resonant work. The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) Dir. Otto Preminger / American One-sheet From the dawn of motion […]
What more needs to be said about Psycho, other than it has exercised influence over every horror-thriller post 1960. Forgoing the larger budgets of Vertigo and North by Northwest, director Alfred Hitchcock wanted to dabble in the burgeoning independent market, so he stripped back the crew, retained the members from his tv show ‘Alfred Hitchcock […]