We often associate progress with height – look no further than the post-World War II boom in skyscrapers. In a pre-credits scene from Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il buco (The Hole, 2021), a group of Italian villagers, huddled around a staticky television outside a café, watch footage of a newsman touring one such building. “We are climbing up […]
Tag: Nature
Shot a few months after the triple disaster that hit Japan’s Eastern Pacific Coast in March 2011 – an earthquake followed by a tsunami and core meltdowns in three reactors at the nuclear power plant in the Fukushima Prefecture – Sion Sono’s The Land of Hope (Kibo no kuni, Japan, 2012) addresses a great variety […]
James Dickey’s novel opens with a map being unrolled. Disconcerting – “curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned it loose” – then, revealing – “All this in here will be blue … this whole valley will be under water.” John (Point Blank) Boorman’s movie version unveils the river itself through a curtain of […]
In his autobiography, Something Like an Autobiography, Akira Kurosawa mentions that since his youth he had loved horses and had spent whole afternoons at the hippodrome in Meguro. One of his screenplays written in the early 1940s was called Jajauma monogatari (The Story of a Bad Horse). This project was never realized, but Uma no […]
Inspired by William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Akira Kurosawa created, with Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jo, Japan, 1957), visual poetry: in black and white, light and shade, movement and immobility. Kurosawa does not try to put Shakespearean English into Japanese. Instead, image and rhythm replace words, pointing to the visual nature of Shakespeare’s language. In this way, Kurosawa, […]
Fairy tales are for kids. Or are they? Natural landscapes have inspired imaginations for centuries. Norway’s spectacular scenery in particular has conjured a considerable legacy of folklore, fairy tales, and mythology; it is a landscape full of mystery, with plenty of pockets to hide in. André Øvredal’s Troll Hunter (2010) takes us back to Norway’s narrative origins, […]
If “art is an act of violence” as the uncompromising Nicolas Winding Refn has attested, then his vicious Viking abstraction Valhalla Rising must surely belong in the Louvre. Cut to the bone in terms of narrative and dialogue, the only thing harsher than the inevitability of (often brutal) death in Refn’s powerful and primeval journey […]
A feathered archipelago stretching northward into the Arctic Circle, Canada’s Nunavut territory is known for its rich and storied Inuit art, including sculpture, music and dance. It’s also the home of a 21st century wave of independent filmmaking – stories told by the Inuit population using homegrown talent. At the centre is Isuma, the award-winning […]
The great outdoors – here a maritime space – is a protagonist in its own right in John Boorman’s two-character film Hell in the Pacific (1968). The two marooned soldiers, played by Lee Marvin and Toshirō Mifune, fight for survival on an uninhabited atoll and fight each other before facing together the hazards of the […]