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Geoffrey O’Brien

Geoffrey O’Brien’s books include The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century, Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film, 2002–2012, and, most recently, the poetry collection The Blue Hill. (August 2018)

IN THE REVIEW

Miracle in Bologna

Conrad Veidt and Lillebil Christensen in Urban Gad’s Christian Wahnschaffe, 1920–1921

Il Cinema Ritrovato

a film festival in Bologna, Italy, June 23–July 1, 2018
To roam at will among films lost, films never seen, films quite likely not even known by you to exist, day after day among spectators all animated by a common attentiveness and palpable curiosity, as if nothing existed outside the parallel world of cinema: for some of us that might …

Freudian Noir

Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Laura, 1944

Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

by David Bordwell
One night not long ago I found myself once again drawn into a movie from the tail end of the 1940s. This one, with the thoroughly generic title Backfire (not to be confused with Crossfire or Criss Cross or Backlash), did not come with a high pedigree. It had sat on the shelf for two years after it was filmed in 1948, and afterward seems to have faded quickly from recollection. But movies of that time, when they emerge decades later, have devious ways of holding the attention: beguiling hooks and feints lead deeper into a maze whose inner reaches remain tantalizing no matter how many times those well-worn pathways have been explored, and no matter how many times the interior of the maze has led only to an empty space.

Polymorphous Eden

Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables

an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, March 2–June 10, 2018
Grant Wood became famous pretty much overnight in October 1930, when American Gothic was included (a last-minute choice after being initially rejected) in the annual exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Chicago Evening Post slapped a photo of it on the front page of its art section under the headline: “American Normalcy Displayed in Annual Show; Iowa Farm Folks Hit Highest Spot”; the image was picked up by newspapers across the country, all quick to underscore the painting’s corn belt authenticity. Wood—whose most notable previous achievements had been successive first prizes in art at the Iowa State Fair—found himself at thirty-nine not only a celebrity but the embodiment of a movement, or at least the journalistic notion of a movement, steeped in patriotic overtones. Few artists have been worse served by their defenders.

Dinner from Hell

Rod Gilfry as Alberto Roc, Amanda Echalaz as Lucía de Nobile, and Christine Rice as Blanca Delgado in Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel

The Exterminating Angel

an opera by Thomas Adès, with a libretto by Tom Cairns and Thomas Adès based on a screenplay by Luis Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza, directed by Tom Cairns
“People go to a dinner party and for some reason they can’t leave,” a Met patron was explaining to his companion as we waited in the lobby for the doors to open for Thomas Adès’s new opera, The Exterminating Angel. Of all plots it must be the easiest to recap.

NYR DAILY

O’Neill’s Dark Energy at BAM

Matthew Beard as Edmund Tyrone, Jeremy Irons as James Tyrone, Rory Keenan as Jamie Tyrone, and Lesley Manville as Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2018

The rattled breathlessness of Lesley Manville’s delivery as Mary in BAM’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, as if half a second’s interruption would bring everything crashing down, established the state of things in the Tyrone household with no delay: the masks are already off. Manville’s Mary is not merely distracted but positively a junkie with screaming nerves. The play is a work that mercilessly tests each actor’s ability to inhabit roles that are not characters but beings, summoned by an authorial process that can only be conceived as an occult attempt to restore speech to the dead.

Immersed in ‘Cold Water’

Cyprien Fouquet as Gilles and Virginie Ledoyen as Christine in Olivier Assayas's Cold Water, 1994

Originally made for French television in 1994, as part of a series of hour-long films, Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water was released in France at feature length the same year. A quarter of a century later, with rights finally cleared for Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Nico, Alice Cooper, Donovan, and the others whose music provides not merely flavor but structure, Cold Water can finally be recognized as a singular masterpiece on the most familiar of themes, the sufferings and misfortunes of youthful passion.

The Pattern and Passion of ‘Phantom Thread’

Vicky Krieps as Alma and Daniel Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock in Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, 2017

The metaphor of couture is hard to avoid in a film so centrally involved with measuring and cutting and sewing, stitching and unstitching. The very visible boldness of the editing, the leaps and ellipses, keep the idea of cutting very much at the forefront. A crucial scene in which a wedding dress must be repaired overnight evokes both an emergency medical operation and the race against time to reshape a film in the editing room.

Shakespeare’s Pornography of Power

Thomas Jay Ryan as Angelo and Cara Ricketts as Isabella in Simon Godwin’s production of Measure for Measure at Theatre for a New Audience, 2017

Measure for Measure invites updating, but it’s in the nature of the work that whatever contemporary analogies are invoked cannot quite make sense of what happens. The play is a perpetual questioning machine, exquisitely functional, set to a relentless tempo, yet a machine that bristles and crackles in its joints with contradiction and discomfort.

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