If you’ve always wanted to study film, here’s your chance! In this series, the authors of “Film Art: An Introduction” bring film school home in plain language. This month, Jeff Smith breaks down a classical Hollywood score with a Hitchcockian twist.
Our home film school continues with David Bordwell’s analysis of Akira Kurosawa’s first film, a showcase for the powerhouse director’s range of talents.
In the third installment in our ongoing introduction to film language, Professor Kristin Thompson offers an analysis of the legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's quiet genius.
Professor David Bordwell applies his analysis of film language to Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA, illustrating how the director uses careful staging and methodical framing to keep us guessing about his characters’ feelings and motivations.
Using the great Spanish film THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, by Victor Erice, professor Kristin Thompson shows how restricting us to a child's point of view can make the familiar seem strange and emphasize the horrors of war.
Professor Jeff Smith shows us how Krzysztof Kieślowski’s THREE COLORS: RED uses camera movements to establish elusive connections between two characters who are largely unaware of one another.
Jean Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME is famed for its deep-focus photography and intricate staging. Professor Kristin Thompson analyzes the elaborate construction—and mesmerizing chaos—of Renoir’s symphonic tragicomedy.
Professor Jeff Smith demonstrates how Claude Chabrol manages to play his audience like a piano, evoking suspense, isolation, and class conflict through an expertly tuned soundtrack.
From tramp to serial killer: find out how Charlie Chaplin reinvented himself for this pitch-black comedy.
Professor Jeff Smith illustrates how Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s deliberate blocking and tableau compositions accentuate the social divisions that crisscross his 1974 masterpiece.
Listen closely: Fritz Lang’s claustrophobic thriller has one of the densest, most skillfully layered soundtracks in all of early sound film.
What do actors do when they act? Few aspects of film craft are as widely discussed—and as little understood.
Professor Kristin Thompson explores the intricate chronology of Victor Sjöström’s innovative ghost story.
David Bordwell shows how Harold Lloyd helped silent comedy evolve from gag-based skits to increasingly intricate narrative forms.
Jeff Smith walks us through Robert Altman’s most intricately allusive film, a satire that enlists genre tropes in order to send up the Hollywood assembly line that spits them out.
Professor Kristin Thompson explores how Raymond Bernard evoked the horror and despair of battle in his shatteringly realistic World War I film.
David Bordwell unpacks Wong Kar-wai’s intricate approach to double-pronged storytelling in one of the defining works of nineties cinema.
Professor David Bordwell explores the “expressive movement” that animates one of Sergei Eisenstein’s boldest experiments in film form, demonstrating how the director draws on the language of dance and painting.
Professor Kristin Thompson breaks down the lush palette of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s sensuous masterpiece, showing how set designer Alfred Junge and cinematographer Jack Cardiff use splashes of color to trace the film’s emotional arc.
Professor Jeff Smith walks us through the basics of continuity editing and shows how William Dieterle’s faustian fever dream adheres to that code while testing the limits of its expressive potential.
Jeff Smith unpacks Robby Müller’s handheld camera work in Lars von Trier’s wrenching fable, showing how it alternates choppy realism with calculated stylization.
Professor Kristin Thompson explores the ways in which dissolves allow Terence Davies to mimic the fluidity and emotional texture of memory in his elegiac coming-of-age film.
Professor David Bordwell traces the ways in which director Alain Resnais and screenwriter Marguerite Duras retooled cinematic language to evoke the texture of memory in their 1959 masterpiece.
Professor Jeff Smith explores how François Truffaut harnesses the 2.35:1 aspect ratio in his wildly playful gangster-movie pastiche, a giddy high point in the French New Wave’s assault on cinematic convention.
Professor David Bordwell illuminates how Julien Duvivier’s haunting, exquisitely bittersweet romantic drama deploys intricate, subjective flashback sequences to enhance its sublime emotional impact.
The first Cuban film to garner international attention in the years following the nation’s 1959 revolution, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT remains one of the most important works of the influential Third Cinema movement that emerged in the developing world as a response to neocolonialist modes of filmmaking. In this episode of Observations on Film Art, Professor Jeff Smith explores the film’s complex depiction of its notably unsympathetic central character—a misanthropic bourgeois intellectual whose moral apathy has rendered him a relic of a bygone era—and how Alea uses a variety of innovative stylistic techniques to evoke his subjectivity. In doing so, Smith illuminates how this landmark of Cuban cinema challenged audiences to evaluate their own commitment to the revolution.
Master director Kenji Mizoguchi’s final film, STREET OF SHAME—a wrenching portrait of women working in a brothel in Tokyo’s red-light district—employs intricate mise-en-scène to create an almost hypnotic relationship between viewer and image. In this episode of Observations on Film Art, Professor David Bordwell examines how the filmmaker, working with the great cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, uses camera placement, framing, and intricate choreography of movement to build anticipation, define the relationships between characters, and heighten the film’s powerful critique of patriarchal injustice. "
Professor Kristin Thompson explores illusion and reality in Jacques Tati’s final film.
Jane Campion came to international attention with her acclaimed sophomore feature An Angel at My Table, a luminous adaptation of the memoirs of Janet Frame, tracing her journey from her childhood in New Zealand to her time in a mental hospital to her emergence as a renowned writer. In this episode of Observations on Film Art, Professor Kristin Thompson explores how Campion uses a strategy of concealment and carefully orchestrated reveals to create curiosity, tension, and surprise and to immerse the viewer in Frame’s unique subjectivity.
Adapted from the beloved novel by Miles Franklin, Gillian Armstrong’s Australian New Wave classic MY BRILLIANT CAREER depicts the world of a rebellious young woman who dreams of becoming a writer while growing up in the rugged countryside of nineteenth-century Australia. In this episode of Observations on Film Art, Professor Jeff Smith explores how Armstrong uses lighting, costuming, and decor to upend the conventionally masculine mythologies of the frontier tale, creating a uniquely feminine “western” in which self-realization is tied to creative expression and the rejection of patriarchal norms.
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s haunting 1932 masterpiece VAMPYR has long occupied a singular place in film history, resting somewhere at the intersection of horror, avant-garde cinema, and waking nightmare. In this episode of Observations on Film Art, Professor David Bordwell explores how Dreyer managed to honor the conventions of horror cinema while at the same time breaking the boundaries of the genre wide open through his experimental use of sound, shadows, and camera movement. In doing so, Dreyer created a mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind work of dreamlike dread that paved the way for generations of innovative independent horror films to come.
Though its premise is not far removed from that of a straightforward horror movie, Peter Weir’s Australian New Wave classic PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK forgoes conventional shocks in favor of an eerie, otherworldly languor that’s closer to the moody atmospherics of an art film. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Kristin Thompson illustrates how Weir uses soft-focus cinematography, slow motion, and superimpositions to cast an ethereal, enigmatic spell that has tantalized viewers for decades.
Ennio Morricone is perhaps the preeminent film composer of the last half century, an enormously influential artist whose iconic melodies and imaginative orchestrations grace some of the greatest films ever made. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Jeff Smith analyzes Morricone’s masterful score for Gillo Pontecorvo’s revolutionary bombshell THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, an explosive portrait of the Algerian struggle for independence from France. Exploring Morricone’s use of two distinct themes—one representing the French fighters, the other the Algerian resistance—Smith illuminates how the latter’s perpetually unresolved harmonics come to mirror the unending nature of the war itself.
One of the last Japanese directors to make the transition to sound, Yasujiro Ozu continued making silent pictures until the midthirties. His lovely 1933 domestic drama PASSING FANCY is a gently humorous take on one of his signature themes: the relationship between fathers and sons. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor David Bordwell explores the many ways in which Ozu’s distinctive approach to editing shapes the viewer’s engagement with the characters and their conflicts, adding another dimension to the poignant, human story at the heart of the film.
From the very first shot of her very first feature, LA CIÉNAGA, Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel laid claim to a distinctive, defiantly strange cinematic syntax unlike any other. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Kristin Thompson examines the surprising choices—uncomfortably tight framing, unusual camera positions, and soft- and out-of-focus lensing—that Martel uses to keep the identities of and relationships between her characters intriguingly opaque and to heighten the film’s stinging critique of bourgeois torpor.
In his watershed feature debut BLACK GIRL, master director Ousmane Sembène offers a searing critique of colonialism’s legacy via the story of Diouana, a young Senegalese woman whose new life in France working for a white family gradually reveals itself to be a trap. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Jeff Smith deconstructs Sembène’s multilayered use of dialogue and language, exploring how the central character’s outward terseness (what the director called “a defensive muteness”) contrasts with the film’s use of voice-over, which makes the viewer privy to Diouana’s inner thoughts as she grows increasingly disaffected with her situation. That both are expressed in French—the language of the colonizer, which Sembène’s funders required him to use—only enhances the film’s devastating portrait of cultural alienation.
In his stunning feature debut, Steve McQueen (SMALL AXE, 12 YEARS A SLAVE) used minimal dialogue and vivid imagery to tell the harrowing true story of Irish Republican Army member and political prisoner Bobby Sands’s hunger strike against the British state. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Kristin Thompson explores how McQueen’s background as a sculptor and installation artist informed his uniquely tactile approach to storytelling and how he uses an accumulation of seemingly small, often elusive visual details—a fly, a snowflake, a brush, an ashtray, a feather—to create a visceral experience that “speaks” more fully through its images than it does through words.
With their razor-sharp debut BLOOD SIMPLE, Joel and Ethan Coen introduced the world to their striking sensibility and redefined film noir for a new generation. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor David Bordwell explores how the brothers employ a sophisticated shuffling of viewpoints in order to generate nonstop suspense and surprise and to create a cool, sometimes comic detachment from the story’s increasingly berserk proceedings.
With his extraordinary debut feature, PATHER PANCHALI, Satyajit Ray introduced the world to his poetic, humanist vision and to the indelible story of Apu, the young Bengali boy whose odyssey he would trace over two subsequent films. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Kristin Thompson considers the film’s title—which translates to “Song of the Little Road”—and the subtle but complex motif of paths and roads that runs through the film. More than just a metaphor for life’s winding journey, Ray uses this visual theme—which includes the film’s famous railroad imagery—to enrich our understanding of Apu, his family members, their relationships to one another, and their unforgettable world.
One of the most provocative films by the great Agnès Varda, LE BONHEUR interrogates our ideals of marriage, fidelity, and happiness through the sun-dappled tale of a young husband and father (Jean-Claude Drouot) who begins an affair with an attractive postal worker. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Jeff Smith considers the way that Varda experiments with long takes and quick cutting in this film. The unpredictable rhythms of Varda’s editing choices build tension, contributing to her unsettling exploration of the contradictions hidden beneath the brightness of the film’s visual palette.
One of the peaks of Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary 1960s creative run, VIVRE SA VIE finds the filmmaker combining brilliant visual design with a tragic character study of a young woman (Anna Karina) on a downward spiral. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor David Bordwell examines Godard’s bold choice to shoot the film in the boxy, 4:3 aspect ratio that was then quickly becoming outmoded in favor of widescreen. Pushing aesthetic boundaries as always, Godard uses the format’s tight framing to maintain a rigorous, almost obsessive focus on his central character, resulting in a work of true cinematic portraiture.
Having explored Jean-Luc Godard’s iconoclastic use of the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio in VIVRE SA VIE in the previous edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor David Bordwell here breaks down the French New Wave renegade’s equally experimental use of the elongated CinemaScope frame in another of his 1960s masterpieces, CONTEMPT. While in VIVRE SA VIE Godard used the square frame to craft an intensely up-close portrait of a woman, in CONTEMPT—a study of a marriage in breakdown spectacularly set against the coast of Italy—he pushed the aesthetic possibilities of CinemaScope to their limits, creating a work that is as much about landscape and environment as it is about human beings.
With THE TAKING OF POWER BY LOUIS XIV, neorealist pioneer Roberto Rossellini created the first of the fascinating, often overlooked historical dramas that would define his late career—and reinvented the costume picture in the process. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Kristin Thompson explores how Rossellini uses meticulously detailed costuming to visually convey the Sun King’s transformation of France from a decentralized, feudal state into an absolute monarchy molded in his own ostentatious image. The result is a singular achievement in which the central tension—the struggle for political power between Louis and the aristocracy—plays out as a cold war of couture.
One of the first masterworks of the twenty-first century, Edward Yang’s YI YI is an at once epic and intimate portrait of a year in the life of a Taiwanese family. It is also, as Professor Jeff Smith argues in this edition of Observations on Film Art, a valentine to the transcendent possibilities of cinema. Exploring Yang’s subtly sophisticated use of framing, reflections, and the techniques of rear projection and superimposition, Smith reveals how the director uses these uniquely cinematic devices to draw our attention to the moments of ephemeral beauty that pass, almost unnoticed, across our everyday field of vision.
Adapted from Russell Banks’s novel about a small town reckoning with trauma in the wake of a tragic school-bus accident, Atom Egoyan’s THE SWEET HEREAFTER is a profound meditation on grief and loss that manages to find compassion and hope in the bleakest of circumstances. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Jeff Smith explores the bold decisions that Egoyan made in bringing Banks’s novel to the screen—particularly his complex use of nonlinear, associative editing that moves the story back and forth in time to reveal unexpected resonances between the film’s characters and themes. In forgoing traditional narrative structure, Egoyan arrives at something altogether deeper, more mysterious, and uniquely cinematic.
With her radically anarchic Czechoslovak New Wave landmark DAISIES, director Věra Chytilová set out, in her own words, “to make a film that is aesthetically pleasing and interesting, yet [which] is an image of destruction,” one in which “the idea of ‘destruction’ is present in everything, in every move of the camera.” In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Kristin Thompson breaks down the complex visual motifs—in particular the use of plant and food imagery—that Chytilová employs to advance this aesthetic of annihilation, ultimately creating a film that threatens to literally self-destruct.
Driven by the music of the Who’s classic rock opera from which it takes its name, Franc Roddam’s QUADROPHENIA is an exhilarating expression of youthful rebellion and a quintessential snapshot of the defiant, drug-fueled mod subculture of early-1960s London. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Jeff Smith examines the very specific role that clothing and fashion play in the film—how they served as cultural and class signifiers at a time when proclaiming one’s group identity (are you a mod, or a rocker?) was a matter of existential importance.
David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith are leading film scholars and the authors of the definitive cinema studies textbook, “Film Art.” This short documentary introduces you to the three of them in Madison, Wisconsin‚ both on campus at the University of Wisconsin and in Thompson and Bordwell’s home, where they store their 20,000-strong collection of film reference books.