The Big Picture Magazine
There Was a Father (1942) is one of two films Yasujirô Ozu made during Japan’s efforts in World War II and, as such, is a film that was influenced by the Japanese government’s increased control over all aspects of the country’s film industry. Under the watch of the ruling powers, films were encouraged to promote […]
Through the years, science fiction posters and subtlety have not been the best of pairings. Forbidden Planet gave us one of many over-saturated and melodramatic visual spectacles: the eye-catching (if absent from the film) scene of Robbie the Robot kidnapping a scantily-clad woman, and the word ‘AMAZING!’ stamped on top. Star Wars started a trend […]
It is perhaps fitting that in the year that saw the world descend into civil unrest, a micro-budget splatter movie in which the dead rise from the grave and usher in the apocalypse would redefine both the horror genre and contemporary cinema. There is horror before 1968’s epochal Night of the Living Dead, and there […]
For most of La vie de Jésus Bruno Dumont has his audience riding pinion with a gang of bored young motorcyclists. They roam aimlessly around a widescreen rendered, rural northeastern France, waiting for their lives to happen, or for someone to merely notice they are there. However, a potentially racist act of violence towards the […]
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 […]
As a tie-in to the print issue’s theme of ‘Winter’s Discontent’, Neil Mitchell looks at an object that carried just as much physical weight as it did metaphorical baggage in Courtney Hunt’s frosty, border-crossing thriller. Brief as its appearance in Courtney Hunt’s taut, downbeat thriller it may be, but the duffel bag that’s dumped and […]
Beyond its utility in replicating the interior of a building convincingly, the architectural set attracted film-makers who held that cinema allowed an entirely new kind of story-telling. In Weimar Berlin, Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer each drew on disturbing personal incidents to write The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and believed that a fully visual filmic experience was necessary […]
Gus (John Cassavetes) and Mary (Jenny Runacre) jump out of a black London cab and into the sanctuary of Henry’s Soup Kitchen, a non-descript café, Gus pausing momentarily to throw the fare through the cab window, desperate that the incessant rain doesn’t touch him. The pair have spent the night together, sharing a complicated, fleeting […]
Directors often rely on composers to provide key signature passages in their film scores to aid the audience’s journey through a narrative – think John Williams’ iconic themes for Indiana Jones or Superman - but objects, and the sounds they make, can often become just as effective in helping to support character recognition, thematic progression […]