Word: film
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1970
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...macabre sort of way, they are both very funny. Trash, the first Andy Warhol factory film to be distributed commercially nationwide, is the story of a heroin addict (Joe Dallesandro) who is constantly on the verge of O. D.-ing. Perhaps this does not seem humorous in itself, but, for good measure, there is a running gag about Joe's smack-induced impotency. Paul Morrissey (who wrote, directed and photographed this epic) has structured his film around the gag; Trash is a series of boy-meets-girl-but-can't-get-it-up episodes, each one weirder than the next...
...auteur theory of film criticism has gone through many transformations since its initial conception. For Andre Bazin and his Cahiers du Cinema scions in the 40's and 50's, approaching a film as if it were creatively guided by a single intelligence-preferably that of the director-provided opportunities for scholarly, disciplined film thought. Just as a modern writer is judged more by an oeuvre, his body of work, than by a single masterpiece, the Cahiers critics traced continual directorial themes and motifs, evaluating the creator's relationship to his subject by the manner in which it was visually...
...most distressing historical accomplishment of Sarris's rise to fame has been his ability to turn avowed cultism into a major dynamic in a film world previously unsullied by grotesque consumer fetishism. With Kauffmann writing for the New Republic, Dwight MacDonald for Esquire, and Robert Hatch for the Nation, film scholarship was not in the "shambles by the early sixties" that Sarris claims. And despite the spiritual association Sarris (and nearly every other film critic) attempts to make with James Agee, he is far removed from that critic's quality. Though Sarris, while writing for Film Culture, the Village Voice...
Well, with the help of others like the febrile Mr. Byron, who reviewed Sarris's latest tome in adulatory terms in the New York Times Book Review, Sarris has legitimized the auto-erotic school of film criticism. What is looked for in a film is the indelible signature of a personality; given that, whether expressed through direction or writing, cutting or sound, Sarris will analyze the data and produce a personal philosophy...
Well, given an auteur who's also a good director, he will manage to come up with as good an explication of his films as most critics; possibly, because of his fine eve for visuals, a better one. He does champion such out-of-current mood directors as Peckinpah and Renoir; he is generally concerned with instituting fashion according to his own "impassioned" integrity rather than merely following the fashionable (though his recent 2001 recantation was curious indeed). With such developments as his labeling of Fellini as the "Busby Berkeley of metaphysics," and a latent inclination towards admirable historical research...