The Film Canon: Pierrot le Fou (1965)

The films of Jean-Luc Godard, that great iconoclast of the French New Wave, have always been so mired in an esoteric miasma of philosophical/pop-cultural minutiae that attempting to decode them for their intended interior meanings is an exercise not only…

The Film Canon: Black God, White Devil (1964)

By the 1960s Brazilian cinema was in a crisis. For almost a decade Brazil had suffered under the tyranny of foreign (read: American) distributors and narrow-minded exhibitors that flooded the market with Hollywood epics and puerile chanchadas—low-budget musicals frequently featuring…

The Film Canon: The Collected Works of Alice Guy-Blaché

Look closely. What do you see? It might help to squint a little. The footage is over 100 years old, after all. In the center of the frame is a woman in a light dress surrounded by flowers. By her feet…

The Film Canon: Alice (1988)

“Now you will see a film,” the young red lips tell us, “made for children.” A pause, a break, and the lips return. “Perhaps.” Another pause, another break. “But I nearly forgot!” Pause, break, a piano ascends a major scale…

The Film Canon: Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998)

“Mother! Bring me into the world,” the child cries from within his mother’s womb. “A child who can speak from his mother’s womb can bring himself into the world,” the mother quietly replies. A tiny child crawls from between her…

The Film Canon: Sabotage (1936)

In 1936 Alfred Hitchcock’s name was not yet immortalized as the Master of Suspense, but he was getting there. Having labored through the twenties and early thirties making flat, flavorless silent melodramas and romantic “comedies,” Hitchcock had reinvented himself as…

The Film Canon: The Ascent (1977)

Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent is one of the most tactile of films. The soundtrack submerges the audience in harsh, overbearing sounds: the heavy creak of wooden floors, the sharp crunch of snow, the popping of seeds being chewed by starving…