The Small Back Room

The review is published on Film Internatonal website. Director Anthony Mann famously said “…without a woman the Western wouldn’t work.”  But how have themes of femininity on the frontier in women-led Westerns changed from silent to the streaming age of cinema? In Sue Matheson’s book Women in the Western, published by University of Edinburgh, the idea of the essential nature of the female presence in America’s frontier mythology is explored in eighteen contributing essays divided into two main chapters, those regarding the traditional period of the genre, from silents to the 1940s, on to post-Second World War years, and also the revisionist and post-modern Western.  Historian David Blanke’s essay “When East Goes West: The Loss of Dramatic Agency in DeMille’s Western women from the 1910s to the 1930s” deals with the director’s establishment within the genre. From 1914 until 1917, DeMille made seven Western features and advanced from stage to film directing. Blanke establishes the w...

Robert Frank died in September this year. In the mid 1950s, traveling on a Guggenheim fellowship, he took 27,000 photographs while crossing America. He distilled a book of 81 photographs out of 800 rolls of film and called it The Americans. It made diners, off-beaten tracks and cool cowboys on city pavement popular. And almost a dream. Although nothing was as it appears. If it wasn’t for his monograph The Americans, an average European who dreams of vast Prairies, endless road trips of self-discovery, of getting lost, would have a harder time imagining how that trip might actually look. He’s the artist who became a journalist soon to become a filmmaker , on temporary assignment to our collective dreams, the “walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,” He was half foreign, half immigrant; half genius, half savant and a pure component of the adulterated profane. One of the original high art low-lives, it was in opposites where he truly thrived. He made what the amate...

The world is so different in the daylight. In the dark, your fantasies get so out of hand. But in the daylight everything falls back into place again.” – These are the worlds spoken by the unconventional heroine played by Candance Hilligoss in a surreal and lonely horror film from 1962 called Carnival of Souls. Mary suffers a traumatic car accident, a car drag and falls from the bridge in the car with two of her other friends to be the only one surviving and walking away from it, seemingly unhurt. Soon she starts to feel out of touch with herself and the rest of society. She continues her way to Utah where she got a job as a local church organist. We move fast from the scene of the accident to her seemingly “normal” continuation of life or so we think. In the car, on the way to the town , she sees a strange white faced The Man, a ghoul, that creeps her out but it doesn’t scare her. She meets another one in the boarding house where she checks in, this one in flesh and blood, the creepy...

Ray Meets Helen is Alan Rudolph’s 22nd film to date and sadly last film Sondra Locke played in. It’s the 6th film Alan made with Keith Carradine who plays Ray, a broken down ex-boxer now doing shady jobs for his pal and employe Harve (Keith David) who also goes behind his back and meets up with Ray’s ex Ginger (Jennifer Tilly), a self-proclaimed last living romantic. Ray meets Helen in a restaurant and they bond instantly. She arrived to L.A. asking money loan and after being refused, meets a lonely woman who commits suicide and leaves an impromptu will: whoever finds her first can enjoy her wealth. Helen seizes the opportunity. She is in need of the money as all the family deaths are coming to her and dying costs. There are more characters on display and even though it may seem a hot mess, Ray Meets Helen is a display of certain freedom only a few directors maintain in Hollywood. Unconvential plot is not catered to the contemporary needs. It’s flawed, mysterious, allienated. It gives ...

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...