‘That’s one more for the bonfire.’ There is something inherently disturbing to a film those scariest creatures are not an army of flesh-eating resuscitated cadavers, but the living human beings that are in fact their victims. More than its extravagant gruesomeness and unrelenting pace, the slow reveal of how things one would give as granted deeply overturn is what makes Night of the Living Dead so brutal, creepy, and clever. A complexity, not least sociopolitical, that Romero never apparently sought—but then again, intuitions, not intentions make an artist great.
As I was recently browsing through some articles on the case, I found an interesting one by Roger Ebert¹ that I don’t think I had come across before. Writing a few months after the theatrical release of the film, his didn’t literary review it, but rather recounted the experience—one that today seems unrealistically far in time, with people showing up early to get the best seats, queueing eagerly to see what word of mouth had already made into a sensation and, as the film rolled, screaming in horror, turning quiet in shock, or crying. Having noticed the young age of most in the audience, and one little girl in particular weeping motionless a few seats away from him, Ebert made a point on the loose rating of the film. Making clear that censorship is never an answer, he argued that the lack of regulation was possibly due to a cynical box office strategy. ‘Maybe that’s it,’ he concluded, ‘but I don't know how I could explain it to the kids who left the theater with tears in their eyes.’ No need to explain, I dare belatedly replying. Because those are the kids who fell in love with cinema. And among them, perhaps some of today’s filmmakers.

1. The Night of the Living Dead, Roger Ebert (Reader’s Digest, 5 January 1969).

Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s striking b/w hallucination is some sort of a mature sequel to Ken Russell’s perhaps overly praised The Devils. What Mother Joan of the Angels retains is the disturbing sense of the unseen that makes Huxley’s sociohistorical dissection of the infamous events of Loudun so fascinating.
Kawalerowicz’s empty volumes seem to tell of human desolation, the inherent loneliness of existence, and the fear of void as a representation of what led to believe in divine and demonic entities in the first place—the unknown.
The architectural sense of space in Mother Joan, the dialogue between the austerity of the structures and the lunar nowhere all around the convent, don’t just create a vivid contrast—they feed an unexpected dialogue of ancestral reminiscence. A similar sense of antipodean duality surfaces in different forms throughout the film. ‘You only want me to calm down to become greyer, smaller. To be exactly like all the other nuns. […] And you want to make me just like thousands of those aimless wanderers. […] If I can’t be a saint, I’d rather be damned,’ says Mother Joan to Father Suryn, incidentally echoing an idiosyncratic longing of a time, our, when more than ever everybody is striving to be someone only succeeding at being like anyone else. In another scene, Suryn is received by the local rabbi, who’s interpreted by the same actor. The two men verbally clash although the priest’s counterpart insists, ‘I am you, and you are me.’ And in a most memorable one, Suryn ambiguously meets Mother Joan in a room where the nuns’ freshly cleaned tunics are hung to dry. His dark cassock, her white habit, and their eyes looking for each other between the luminous robes—a marvellous moment of quiet transcendence and palpable eroticism.

A seductive music sinuously guides the camera through an atelier mixing the characters with the mannequins, instantly setting the tone of the film and somehow the rules of its game. Cut to an exterior shot in a stormy night. The red sign of a fashion house breaks and falls dangling in the wind—an ancestral image of lifelessness that will be restaged right at the end by a scarlet receiver. It only took me the opening to know why I had fallen in love with this film so madly the first time I saw it despite its flaws and my little interest for the genre.
Blood and Black Lace has the unrealistic impeccable rationality of a giallo and the dramatic stylisation that only works in comics. Massimo and Cristiana could be the characters of an episode of Diabolik, with which incidentally the film shares the same contempt for a certain greedy, smartly dressed nouvelle bourgeoisie and the use of exotic names to create a vaguely international nowhere feeling. On the same note, Mario Bava doesn’t mind shooting around recognisable landmarks, but goes for the less known—like the Appian Way or the beautiful church of San Giorgio al Velabro. Rome of course is never explicitly mentioned.
The dialogues are pretty bad. Despite the efforts of the dubbers the performances are patchy to say the least. In a time when the best talents had bigger names to chase and genre films were obscured by what were considered more serious titles, Mario Bava often had to work with less experienced artists. And yet, for some perverse reason, this almost adds to the quirky charm of the film.
What’s really captivating of Blood and Black Lace are its aesthetics and mise-en-scène. Bava’s virtuoso pictorial approach and ‘silly colours,’ as they were described at the time by some conservative critic, inspired legions of filmmakers in the decades to come. The obsessive use of colour red might be an obvious choice for a horror film, but its impact is nevertheless effective—it certainly takes a master to revert a cliché to pristine state.
Towards the end of the film, the operator hits a mannequin while advancing in the ominously empty atelier. Deliberate or not, what may have been a mistake turns out emphasising a distinctive trait of Bava’s filming style—the physical presence of the camera as a ghostly yet palpable entity.
There is a fantastic night shot where the church of San Giorgio is gently lit by the moonlight. A garish pump station logo glows aggressively next to it, and further to the right a flashing neon sign reads ‘dancing’. As often in the history of cinema, budget and creativity not only lie on very different paths. They literally go in opposite directions. Against all odds—that’s how the most valuable works get done after all. And this is one of those.

At the end of the opening of the highly anticipated, eponymous ballet The Red Shoes, the film doesn’t linger so much on the raving response of the audience. It cuts instead to a very intimate moment. The empty space of a dance studio is made indefinitely big by mirror walls. Reflected in the far back of the room, we glimpse a door opening and the tiny figure of Vicky entering. The familiar space suddenly seems huge, mysterious, somehow inhospitable—perhaps a metaphor for how success has just changed the scale of the world around young Vicky. In the still silence, she warms up, stretches at the bar, ready to get back to work as if nothing happened. When the first soloist and the choreographer join her, they celebrate with soundless smiles and respectful gestures of affection. No one utters a single word as if protecting the fragility of the moment—and the sanctity of dancing. This scene will stay with me forever. It is not just moving. In foreboding the unknown that’s bound to come, it almost holds an element of suspense. The discipline, the dream, and the ultimate innocence of the artist even in front of art itself.

The complexity of Lillian Hellman’s characters is fascinating. Our position towards each one of them is constantly teased. And as we are torn between conflictual feelings of comprehension, sympathy, or hatred, a harsh sociopolitical message starts to bite and take shape in the back of our minds.
The whole final act is no less than astonishing. In its climatic epilogue, Bette Davis’s monstrous Regina Giddens looks down from the once imposing staircase of the sumptuous family house as they were about to crumble. Her final words for her fleeting daughter are as bitter, brutal, honest—but also disillusioned—as she’s always been. And as the film itself is. ‘Alexandra, I’ve come to the end of my rope. Somewhere there’s got to be what I want too. Life goes too fast. You can go where you want, do what you want, think what you want. I’d like to keep you with me but I won’t make you stay. No, I won’t make you stay.’ Young Alexandra, now an adult, is not less of a determined woman than her mother is in a time led even more by men than today. ‘You couldn’t, Mama,’ says young Alexandra, now an adult, and not less of a determined woman. ‘Because I don’t want to stay with you. Because I’m beginning to understand about things. Addie said there were people who ate the earth and those that stood around and watched them do it. And just then Uncle Ben said the same thing. Really the same thing. Tell him from me, Mama, I’m not going to watch you do it.’ But have we started to understand about things too, or have we accepted to be the ones who eat the earth? Or worse, become those who watch?

I was about to cancel and indulge in an evening at home full of spectacular acts of grumpiness, but then I thought better of it. Watched as part of a program curated by Gaspar Noé for Picturehouse at the end of a day of shit, I can definitely say it had a pleasant if temporary numbing effect on my battered nerves.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Renzo Piano once said that when an architect makes a mistake, he or she does it for a long time. This note has been stuck in my mind ever since, somehow placing itself closer to cinema than it was indeed intended to be. Sunset Boulevard is like an old building perfectly constructed, that has no mistakes to carry to these days, but its heartbreaking glory as a film, its dramatic ambitions, and candid sense of humanity. There is no such thing as ageing for a great work of art. Like many of its era, Sunset Boulevard seems to have been shot with that confidence flowing in its steaming veins of celluloid.

There are a couple of scenes in the first Don Camillo that make me cry all the times, be it from laughter or emotion. In one, Don Camillo is summoned by the Bishop for having taken part to a fight. He allegedly threw a big table into a bunch of ‘red’ civilians who were making fun of him, knocking all fifteen of them out barehanded. More incredulous than irate at the Reverend’s misconduct, the Bishop asks him to lift his desk to prove that what they say is true and that he acted alone. Almost effortlessly, Don Camillo grabs the bulky piece of furniture and raises it above his head. ‘Now throw it!’ Says the Bishop amazed. Don Camillo hesitates, then obeys. The desk crashes on the floor noisily, making a huge painting fall from the wall. A couple of assistants rush alarmed into room to check that His Excellency hasn’t been hurt. ‘Nothing happened, it was me,’ says candidly the old Bishop. ‘Don Camillo made me angry and I temporary lost my temper.’
Later in the film, the old teacher is on her deathbed. Knowing to have reached the end of her days, she has called Peppone and Don Camillo to make arrangements for her funeral. She has taught to everybody in the village and deserves a particular regard. On her coffin, she would like to have the Italian flag. Not the current republican one, but that of the recently deposed king. Confident she will have her final wish granted, she passes. The following day, the matter is discussed by the municipality. Most of the councillors are firmly against it. ‘As mayor,’ says Peppone, ‘I completely support your position. But in this town,’ he continues, ‘the communists rule, not the council, and as a communist I say that this dead is worth more than all of you alive. She will have the flag that she wanted.’ Then he turns towards Don Camillo, who’s silently enjoying the moment. ‘Unless the reverend has anything to add.’ ‘I will go with whatever the mayor decides!’
It might not be flawless from a strictly cinematographic point of view, but if there’s a film that more than others made me fall in love with cinema, it is right Don Camillo. Guareschi’s dissecting eye is so sharp and accurate to make the famed transpositions to his work resonate today as they did then.
Here is one of the few perks of having grown up in a remote time before streaming existed.

As an aside, I had never noticed that Don Camillo wears a pair of Doc Martens just like mine. Ante and post litteram skinheads, say.

Towards the end of a conference held at Cannes for the twentieth anniversary of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino mentioned that as part of a personal periodic review of the state of cinema, he had recently asked a group of friends who, in their opinion, were the ten most exciting active filmmakers—with that meaning those whose best work they believed was yet to come. Intriguingly, Richard Linklater was on everyone’s list. If only for lack of familiarity with his work, I doubt he would have made it on mine—and yet, if one of his has ever brought me close to share the enthusiasm farsightedly expressed by Tarantino’s circle, it is certainly this. Apollo 10½ is one of those rare films that make me feel nostalgic for an age that I have not lived. Saudade is probably the word I am after—one I always loved.
Such a straight use of the rotoscope technique, to which I have been severely allergic since when I saw as a kid Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings, seems for once perfectly placed and greatly synergic with the gorgeous postcard aesthetics.
Radiating a charming, if not literal, labour of love sense, Apollo 10½ is made to stay and grow—a cuddling dream whose memory can endlessly be revived, every time a little more palpably.

Struck. Alive. My scepticism shattered. Ninety percent of it. Maybe eighty.
Nonetheless excited. My thoughts in progress. My heart beating.

Two main things bug me of Titane. In scattered order, one is how it strives to make the audience cringe with images that are intrinsically cringing. This obsessive nipple business, the expository gruesomeness of a surgical intervention, a self inflicted fracture, an attempted abortion with a hairpin, or the needle of a syringe in the battered bruised skin. It feels a bit like a cheeky shortcut à la Dick Dastardly of Wacky Races. ‘Muttley, do something!’
The other is that it seems to juggle more themes than it can actually handle, ultimately looking like someone who moshes at a party and is too drunk to even rub somebody else’s shoulders.
And yet, enduring its unwelcoming scratchy surface is not an effort that doesn’t pay off. Titane is also full of highly inspired moments and scenes of sheer cinematic bravura. Alexia chasing down the stairs one of her unlucky victims at a house party, for instance. Her improvised dance on top of a fire brigade truck that causes the embarrassment of her agitated, masculine colleagues. Or when Vincent finds her hiding in a wardrobe, wearing, as it turns out, the same yellow female dress his real son used to steal from his mum. ‘They can’t tell me you’re not my son.’
I also didn’t mind Titane’s apparent holes, the unclear connections between its parts, whether of flesh or metal. I found it actually a good example of how narrative and visuals can synergically convey the perception of a vivid thread without necessarily giving all the explanations. It’s a very delicate balance that a few filmmakers know how to achieve without sounding pretentious or unfocused, but rather subtle, honest, and excitingly unpredictable.