Lisa Lieberman's Blog, page 5
July 19, 2014
June 22, 2014
Yojimbo
I’ve heard Yojimbo described as Japanese nihilism and that’s true up to a point. Morally speaking, there are no uplifting lessons here; it’s dog-eat-dog in Akira Kurosawa’s pioneering noir Western.
Kurosawa was a fan of Russian literature. Ten years before he made Yojimbo, he adapted a Dostoevsky novel for the screen. The Idiot was his least successful project, but it was important to him, and very personal, a bleak commentary on postwar Japanese society.
Yojimbo covers the same territory, but it turns out to be less bleak in the end.
Read more on Deathless Prose.
Kurosawa was a fan of Russian literature. Ten years before he made Yojimbo, he adapted a Dostoevsky novel for the screen. The Idiot was his least successful project, but it was important to him, and very personal, a bleak commentary on postwar Japanese society.
Yojimbo covers the same territory, but it turns out to be less bleak in the end.
Read more on Deathless Prose.
June 2, 2014
A Summer Place
Frigid women. Manipulative wives. Bad mothers. Dumb blondes. Alcoholism. Failing marriages. Furtive sex. Before Mad Men revived these retro conventions and somehow made them hip, they were just tawdry.
Read the review on Deathless Prose
Read the review on Deathless Prose
May 20, 2014
Fateless
I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness that I should merely be innocent.
Imre Kertész, Fatelessness
Something akin to survivor's guilt is at the core of Kertész's novel, Fatelessness (1975), a fictionalized account of the year he spent while still a teenager interned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Published during the so-called "soft dictatorship" of the communist leader János Kádár, the book did not sell many copies in Hungary, and no wonder: György Köves, its young narrator, does not want us to feel sorry for him. "I was aware that I was about to start writing a novel that might easily turn into a tearjerker, not least because the novel's protagonist is a boy," Kertész said in a recent interview.
He needn't have worried.
More thoughts on the book and the film in my column over at 3 Quarks Daily.
Imre Kertész, Fatelessness
Something akin to survivor's guilt is at the core of Kertész's novel, Fatelessness (1975), a fictionalized account of the year he spent while still a teenager interned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Published during the so-called "soft dictatorship" of the communist leader János Kádár, the book did not sell many copies in Hungary, and no wonder: György Köves, its young narrator, does not want us to feel sorry for him. "I was aware that I was about to start writing a novel that might easily turn into a tearjerker, not least because the novel's protagonist is a boy," Kertész said in a recent interview.
He needn't have worried.
More thoughts on the book and the film in my column over at 3 Quarks Daily.
April 28, 2014
The Rules of the Game
Long before Downton Abbey, here was an upstairs/downstairs-y story, complete with frocks and motorcars, that didn’t indulge in nostalgia for a lifestyle that was soon to be destroyed. Renoir couldn’t wait to see this world end. It was dead already, as he shows us here.
Read the rest on Deathless Prose.
Read the rest on Deathless Prose.
April 8, 2014
The King and I
The real Anna Leonowens, as Susan Morgan reveals in her fascinating biography, Bombay Anna, was not the proper English lady that Deborah Kerr plays: the fair-haired, blue-eyed widow of a British officer stationed in India.
More
More
March 24, 2014
Somewhere in Europe
Paternalism is the reigning motif of Somewhere in Europe. Under the old man's tutelage, the orphans discover the virtues of solidarity and work. Together they patch up the castle, parceling out the chores according to age, gender, and ability, and making sure that each member of the group has enough to eat and a dry place to sleep. "The world is already yours. You just don't know it," Simon assures them. Once the fascists are gone, he promises, "new people will write new laws in the name of all who need help." He is so fatherly, so benign, that you want to believe him.
Read the rest of my column on Three Quarks Daily.
Read the rest of my column on Three Quarks Daily.
February 24, 2014
The Spirit of the Beehive
The Spirit of the Beehive is one of the most silent films I've ever seen. The atmosphere is one of bereavement, the adults walking around as if their skin hurts, the way you feel when you realize the world no longer holds the person you loved.
Ana comes to enact her parents' grief—and perhaps the grief of Spain itself in the Franco years.
Read the rest of my column on 3 Quarks Daily
Ana comes to enact her parents' grief—and perhaps the grief of Spain itself in the Franco years.
Read the rest of my column on 3 Quarks Daily
February 11, 2014
La jetée
The hero’s nostalgia for the vanished Paris of his own childhood, a more innocent time, brought me back further still. The film is set in the aftermath of a nuclear war, a constant preoccupation in 1962, when the five-year-old me started school.
It’s something of a joke now, the Duck and Cover drills. Practicing hiding under our desks in case of a nuclear attack.
Read the full review on Deathless Prose
It’s something of a joke now, the Duck and Cover drills. Practicing hiding under our desks in case of a nuclear attack.
Read the full review on Deathless Prose
January 27, 2014
Days of Glory
This month's column over at Three Quarks Daily is on Days of Glory, a powerful film by Algerian-French director Rachid Bouchareb about North African soldiers who fought to liberate France in World War II.
