Observations on Film Art

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.