The Small Back Room

How does one find independence in cinema when your own father is cinema immortalized? Steven Rybin’s new book Geraldine Chaplin: The Gift of Film Performance, published by Edinburgh University Press (2020), thoughtfully examines the immortality of a screen performer, and takes as its subject one of the most important actresses of the old and New Hollywood, a veteran of Spanish, French, and contemporary cinema. Geraldine was born Geraldine Leigh Chaplin in Santa Monica, California in 1944 to an acting, literati. and performing family of her father, Charles Chaplin, and his fourth and last wife, Oona O’Neill, herself the daughter of celebrated writer Eugene O’Neill. She made more than 160 movies in her long-lasting career and is still active. She embodies a true Parisienne: a cosmopolitan woman, an artist, a muse. The book serves both as an analysis of her work with various directors and various performances, while drawing parallels to her father’s work and his major acting and director...

The review was originally published on BERLIN FILM JOURNAL site. "I used to go to the porn stores and sex shops in Time Square. There were only men in these stores. I wanted to go where other women didn’t go. I wanted to invade male space, like the Fulton Fish Market, Yankee Stadium, Wall Street. I wanted to look back at them looking at me. In one store, there were magazines and sex booths in the back. After putting 25 cents in a machine behind the curtain and checking out the three minute peep show, I stopped to look at some magazines. The owner of the store asked me to leave. “Why should I? “He said I was making men nervous. And he wondered if I was trying to proposition the guys. It was okay for a woman to be an image in a magazine or on a screen, but a real woman in their space was too disruptive.” The quote is taken from an interview which director Bette Gordon gave for Talkhouse about her cult film, Variety from 1983, set in downtown New York City, in the center of fina...

In A Hidden Life, director Terence Malick’s ninth feature film once again presents a couple closely tied to nature and torn by the darkness brought by the humans upon it. Reaching all the way back to his first feature, the 1973 lyrical Badlands, loosely based on the Charles Starkweather killings, once again his inspiration is a true story of a couple set in a past decade where things seem simpler, and yet more starkly beautiful and deadly. Nature plays an important role, and it is the way in which Malick handles these two competing forces of the couple’s fleeting humanity – the eternal and the fragile, that form the crux of the film. The spiritual presence is where Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) has no principal doubts. He is an utterly faithful and devoted Christian. We see him as a husband to his wife Fanny (Valerie Pachner) and father to his three girls, a caring son to his old single mother (having lost his father in the previous war) and loyal Burger, farmer, a caring friend. F...