Please suggest companion material for some films.
July 1, 2020 11:52 AM   Subscribe

I'm about to take a short, 6 week course on film history from 1945 onward. I'm unfamiliar with many of these films, several of which are from other cultures than my own (USA). If you have some subject matter knowledge on any one or more of these and can recommend short, essay length readings that I can read in advance of viewing to prepare me to appreciate the films more, I'd love to have those recommendations. Film list inside.

The films in question:

The Bicycle Thieves (1948), Vittorio de Sica

Rashomon (1950), Akira Kurosawa

Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock

Breathless (1960), Jean-Luc Godard

Germany, Pale Mother (1980), Helma Sanders-Brahms

The Battle of Algiers (1966), Gillo Pontecorvo

Taxi Driver (1976), Martin Scorsese

The Mirror (1998), Jafar Panahi

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Ang Lee


This is just a fun elective for me, and I'm an adult student. In other words, this isn't a "do my homework for me" question.

I have seen Taxi Driver, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Vertigo, though not since I was younger and I did not view them with a critical eye. I am totally unfamiliar with the other films.

Any great context-lending / historical context giving essays (I don't have time to read full novels on any of the films though I'm sure there are many) would be wonderful, extra bonus points if you can link to them on the 'net. I do have access to a serious library system if net links are not available though.
posted by lazaruslong to Media & Arts (17 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
The Friendly Fire war movie podcast covered The Battle of Algiers. They tend to have great historical and filmmaking insights.
posted by bananacabana at 12:00 PM on July 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Rashomon is based on Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s short story of the same name; there is a PDF of the book that contains the short story available here. I would definitely encourage reading the short story as part of your contextual research, especially since the story is about the Rashomon effect (named after the story/film) and examines how differing accounts of the same event can occur because of variations in personal motivation, memory and human perception.
posted by nightrecordings at 12:02 PM on July 1, 2020 [4 favorites]


Rashomon is based primarily on the story "In a Bamboo Grove" (also in the PDF linked by nightrecordings).
posted by CrunchyFrog at 12:06 PM on July 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


As a companion to Battle of Algiers, I'd encourage you to watch Melville's Armee des Ombres. From occupied to occupier in barely two decades. (It's also a very good film in itself.)
posted by praemunire at 12:08 PM on July 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


Roger Ebert's reviews, especially of what he considers to be great films, place the film in the social or political or historical context of the time. Sometimes that context was the of the time when the movie was made, sometimes it's when the historically based story occurred. The context of which the director and the audience would have been aware.
posted by Homer42 at 1:40 PM on July 1, 2020 [6 favorites]


Seconding Roger Ebert's reviews, I always make a point of reading his take on something after I see it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:52 PM on July 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


A couple of relatively succinct things that come to mind are the Breathless segment from Mark Rappaport's From The Journals of Jean Seberg and the Vertigo segment from Slavoj Žižek's The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Both are well-known documentaries in their own right.

For Crouching Tiger, if you have time my suggestion would be to pair it with King Hu's A Touch of Zen--Ang Lee at least agrees it was an influence--and also glance over this great FPP about wuxia novels. The movie is emblematic of a long literary and cinematic history.

Other folks have covered Rashomon and The Battle of Algiers well, and I'll add that I first heard about the latter from an anthropologist known for theorizing anthropological representations of social scenes, who strongly recommended watching it to admire how much the film lays out: a whole city with multiple groups of people in conflict and multiple perspectives on the histories of colonialism and violence.
posted by Wobbuffet at 1:58 PM on July 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Ebert x 3. Also search under 'reviews'.
posted by j_curiouser at 3:05 PM on July 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


If a film has been selected for the US's National Film Registry, sometimes there is an accompanying essay by a scholar or critic.

An alphabetical index of the essays is here, including a 2-page essay about Vertigo (spoilers!) by a Hitchcock scholar.
posted by theatro at 5:13 PM on July 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


You may enjoy The Icicle Thief, which is a 1989 satire of The Bicycle Thieves and the neo-realism genre in general.
posted by bq at 5:57 PM on July 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Who remembers the sea is hard to find but deal with Algeria and colonialism.
posted by vrakatar at 7:20 PM on July 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Perhaps this old thread will have some ideas for you.
posted by latkes at 7:36 PM on July 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


If you really want to dive deep on these, ask a librarian to help you search a collection of databases like EBSCO for articles. Off the top of my head, I'm guessing articles from a publication like Film Comment will fit the bill nicely.
posted by Rykey at 2:43 AM on July 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


Taxi Driver (1976), Martin Scorsese

It's not about the film, but Mark Jacobson's classic 1975 New York article "Night-Shifting for the Hip-Fleet" contextualizes the world of taxi drivers in NYC in the 70s.
posted by Jahaza at 8:57 AM on July 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


Regarding Vertigo, Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" is sort of the reading people assign for it. You can get a PDF here: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/feminism/mulvey.pdf .
posted by Hypatia at 9:46 AM on July 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


The BFI Film Classics series of short books contains essays and analyses of classic films, e.g., here's the one for Bicycle Thieves. You can buy online or, if you have one open near you, check your local used book store.
posted by the sobsister at 9:32 AM on July 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


I've sometimes found the Criterion collection essays included with their DVDs a bit too hagiographic, which is perhaps to be expected given the author is being paid by the folks releasing the movie. I like the Senses of Cinema site for detailed-but-readable academic looks at films and directors. This essay on Breathless, e.g., nicely captures the practical, semi-accidental reason behind Godard's hugely influential use of jarring jump cuts:

The most patently radical Godardian style was the incessant use of the jump cut, a sudden temporal ellipsis even in the middle of a dialogue take. That’s standard practice now but at the time it broke every dictate of the conventional filmmaking manual. In fact this technique was a little more accidental than political...To be considered a commercial product the movie needed to lose about 30 minutes, so rather than cut out whole scenes or sequences, Godard elected to trim within the scene, creating the jagged cutting style still so beloved of action filmmakers. Godard just went at the film with the scissors, cutting out anything he thought boring and as a result the whole movie does indeed feel rather ‘breathless’, each scene seeming to rush jerkily to a finish, with barely enough time to make full sense. Who would have ever guessed that what is now a cinematic cliché (at its most excessive in the late ’60s and the ’70s) could have had so practical a raison d’etre?
posted by mediareport at 11:57 AM on July 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


« Older I need help navigating pandemic work woes as a WOC   |   Any websites that sell cars with rebuilt titles... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.