Red Line 7000 (1965)
Critic Nick Pinkerton recently fired out the Twitter provocation that âfor decades nearly the entire weight of the industrial American film criticism apparatus has been put into forcing people to pay attention to Sundance indies that no one will remember in a year when it should have been telling them to just chill and watch Red Line 7000.â With this yearâs Sundance titles already starting to appear on these shores, and said Howard Hawks racing-car drama showing up on Talking Pictures TV this weekend, itâs a fine time to trial his theory. Hawksâ late-period movies have long played the role of a stress test for the auteur theory. Can a fishing movie involving a shot of a bear riding a motorbike (1964âs Manâs Favorite Sport?) be an autumnal masterpiece? Indeed it can. Red Line 7000 is the picture he made just after that, a flabbier return to the speedway thrills and off-track camaraderie of his 1932 The Crowd Roars â one tha
Gertrud (1964) that this theme became fully apparent. Gertrud can be read as a feminist liberation story or a compelling case against sexual liberation.
Ordet might be an expression of religious truth, but it might also be anti-theist (it might even be both).
Day of Wrath may be about the cruel persecution of innocent women accused of witchcraft, but it can also be read as a story about the evil of witches and the strange benevolence of their flawed persecutors.
I sympathise with Dreyer’s uncertainty. It is difficult to believe in heaven, but it is also difficult
not to believe in a heaven. This paradoxical sensibility appears repeatedly in Dreyer’s work. He speaks for the undecided those who see something wondrous but are blinded and confused by it; those who sense something frightening or malevolent but can see only its vague outline in the shadows; those who know they are moving towards something, but cannot work out what it is. He speaks for those who look at a situa
TRIESTE: Ivailo Hristov’s feature
Fear (Pro Film) will be screened in the main competition of the 32nd Trieste Film Festival, which runs 21 – 30 January 2021 and focuses on films from the CEE, Baltic and Balkan region.
The story follows the growing revolt and the severe opposition of a jobless teacher towards her fellow villagers, who vehemently deny her relationship with an accidentally arrived black refugee.
According to Hristov, who wrote the script, the idea came to him some years ago while he was spending his summer in a Black Sea village close to the border with Turkey. “One afternoon, I suddenly came across a van with open doors and saw men, women and children packed inside at a temperature of 40 degrees C. Their clothes were stuck to their bodies and their faces were drenched in sweat. I could never forget their eyes,” Hristov told FNE. “But as the film is about a woman making her long way to love in nearly impossible circumstances, so I prefer to define its ge
The Cultural Foundations of Screenwriting: Abrahamism, Part 2
In the continuation of his exploration into Western culture, Dimitri Vorontzov lays out some methods for interpreting Abrahamism in mainstream screenwriting and what that can mean for your story.
Author:
Jan 22, 2021
In Part 1, we reviewed the Christian thematic influences at the core of James Cameron’s 1984 film
The Terminator. In today’s Part 2, we’ll review some of the methods we can apply to creatively interpret the mythology and ethics of Abrahamism in the works of mainstream screenwriting!
Contemporary Western reality is soaked in Christian thinking and even those of us who never set foot to church learned “cultural Christianity” indirectly from our parents, teachers, mentors, and from almost everything we read, watched, or listened to. We may not know the distant source of some of the ideas we use in everyday life, but we can safely expect those ideas to come from the Bible.