Frame by Frame

I’m going to level with you: This film changed my life. Late one Winter night early in my first year at college it transported me to a new plain of experience where everything suddenly appeared richer, more deliberate and beautiful than I had ever thought possible. As ever, this is a stream-of-consciousness watch-through of one of my favourite films in an effort to unpack and more deeply appreciate how much it truly means to me. Stalker is a special movie for which my love is limitless- and I hope whoever’s reading this already has or can one day find a film that means as much to them as this one does to me. Let’s get to it.

Part of what I love about The Long Goodbye is that I used to hate it. I came up through a lot of ultra-precise early 2000s smash-cut air-tight film-making where any breathing room was relegated to the end credits, so American auteur Robert Altman’s loose lucidity lost me time and time again when I first made my way through his movies. Flash-forward to years later after finding complete acceptance with whatever the hell cinema wants to be and I find a true love for his unique use of the form. Always utterly at ease with itself, his greatest work somehow allows the carefree to coalesce into complete transcendence and then lounges back like it never happened. Case in point: The Long Goodbye might just be the funniest movie I’ve ever seen- and it only gets there because it never feels like it’s trying to be. Let’s get into it…

Seriously, who couldn’t love Point Blank ? Dropping into the psycadellic soup of the late-60s right as New Hollywood was first revving into gear, this deadpan mindfuck was a daring early dose of what the industry would finally be putting their faith in over the next decade. In a way it’s a perfect example of New Hollywood’s cultural shockwave: Kicking a standard American revenge thriller through experimental European influences and watching the sparks fly as the fallacy of cheap crime fiction is torn to pieces by the frenzied delusions of dead men. Let's get into it...

A s we’re about to see- from the moment I hit play on The Innocents I knew it would creep up into my heart. Truthfully I’ve failed to really hunt down director Jack Clayton’s other work which is criminal considering this is the finest directed ghost story ever told- and I’d put that above ‘The Shining’ too. T here’s a subtle psyology that elevates Clayton’s tale beyond so many other similar films- but it’s his daring, innovative and fiendishly intoxicating creative risks that take it from top-tier spook to one of the finest films in what might be the cinema’s greatest decade (so far)...

W hen I first saw it, High & Low is one of the few films in my life that has genuinely knocked the life out of me. Back at the tail-end of High School I’d done some work experience at the BFI Southbank and, in all honesty, used and abused their staff discounts to pick up as many must-sees as possible. I n spite of my blossoming love for Kurosawa at the time, High & Low must have sat on my shelf unopened for almost two years before it finally clicked one hazy afternoon. Back then nobody I knew had seen it and the director’s fans oft dismissed it in favour of his more famous works. As of today, I think this sleeping giant is his masterpiece...

I  first saw Masahiro Shinoda’s ‘Pale Flower’ while I was writing for a website called The Cinemaholic, after I’d finally been given carte-blanche to choose whatever topic I wanted and boldly (and incredibly foolishly) decided to tackle the ‘100 Greatest Japanese Films of All Time’. T here’s not a country on this planet as richly blessed in the cinematic arts as Japan. Not even France, or America. In the ashes of the Second World War a nation rocked to the core (perhaps by its own actions as much as anyone else’s) spiralled into a cinematic renaissance that is, frankly, still yet to cease. A nd from the murky depths of early 60s malaise, entrenched in the blossoming wonder of their own New Wave Movement, a genre picture maker named Masahiro Shinoda with more of an eye than most and more to him that anyone’s ever properly given credit for pre-dated the American crime film explosion of the 1970s in one film alone. If they only knew.

I  first saw Hiroshi Teshigahara’s ‘Woman in the Dunes’ early into my first year of college, buried somewhere amidst the treasure trove of world cinema classics YouTube were (knowingly or not) hawking at that time. It immediately struck me as something special but similar to Harakiri I actually found finishing the picture a real challenge. It’s a Gordian knot of Sisyphean black magic I found exhausting on the first few attempts. F lash forward to now and there’s sometimes a saying between artists, painfully amateur or immortally profound, that they wish they’d made someone else’s work. ‘Woman in the Dunes’ is my movie.