Somewhere in the past, Dario Argento once contemplated an idea of taping a row of sharp needles underneath the eyes of cinema audiences viewing his films, thus making it impossible for them to look away even during the goriest ...
Read More »31 Days of Gialloween: Dario Argento’s Opera
To me, Opera (1987) is the last true masterpiece in Dario Argento’s long career filled with cinematic masterpieces. Though he occasionally stumbled, he produced consistently mesmerizing films from his debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), to this film ...
Read More »A Hidden Leprosy Gnawing Our Vitals: Transgression, Incest, and Bertolucci’s La Luna
“I found myself lying down in the apartment of my dead mother… [I] remembered that two years before I participated in an orgy in my mother’s absence, exactly in her room and in her bed which was now supporting her ...
Read More »A Ken Russell Retrospective: Béla Bartók
Recently I began my Ken Russell retrospective with a look at Elgar (1962), one of the director’s early yet influential composer biographies, made as a lengthy episode of the BBC series Monitor. Russell was involved in the series from 1959 ...
Read More »An Andrzej Żuławski Retrospective: Boris Godounov
In Andrzej Żuławski’s unusual career full of cinematic outliers and revolutionary masterpieces, there is nothing quite like his lone opera adaptation, Boris Godounov (1989). Admittedly, that’s really saying something. Though it’s perhaps surprising that someone who explored the horror and ...
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