Last month, on the opening day of Gran Torino, I went up to Lincoln Center to participate in a roundtable discussion about Clint Eastwood for a Film Comment podcast. Kevin B. Lee, who also participated in the roundtable, has since adapted the conversation into three video essays: one on Changeling (in which I am extremely quiet; I guess I was playing by the “if you have nothing nice to say…” rule); one on Gran Torino, and one (embedded above) on the look of Eastwood’s films, and particularly his use of light. I’m quiet in that last one, too, but in this case it’s because my knowledge of Eastwood’s filmography was brutally overmatched by that of the Film Society’s Evan Davis, Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine, Akiva Gottlieb of The Nation.
I’ve always had major problems with Eastwood’s work, but being part of the conversation made me excited about going back and watching some of his directorial efforts that I hadn’t seen, including The Bridges of Madison Country, which coincidentally ended up showing the weekend after we recorded the podcast on the WE network, where I gave it about four hours of my life, counting the frequent breaks for Rich Bride, Poor Bride promos. It was worth it.
I’ve actually been known in the past as something of a Greenaway apologist, but for whatever reason, I found Draughtsman’s ridiculously difficult to get through. I kept returning to a note that I jotted down within the first couple of minutes of the film: “What was Derek Jarman doing the year this film was made? What was Duran Duran doing?” It’s that axis of British culture of the early 1980s that Kevin and I ended up exploring in the above video. But if it was my idea idea to travel down this road, the brilliance of applying the video effects from Rio to footage of Margaret Thatcher on the eve of the Falklands War was all Kevin. Watch and discuss.
Here’s another one for the horror fans: The House Next Door contributor Kevin Lee is producing a series of video essays based on this definitive list of the 1,000 Greatest Films. His most recent installment tackles Inferno, Dario Argento’s horror classic about architecture, identity, and death-by-cats.
In Lee’s mind, Argento’s style contains “a touch too much camp in its perversity to be truly horrifying.” He instead “locates [his] pleasure” in Argento’s emphasis on place and space, recasting Inferno as something like “a horror version of an Antonioni movie.” But whereas Antonioni was concerned with the psychology of his wandering women, Argento’s female protagonists, though similarly traumatized, are little more than graphic elements, “as abstract as the concept of red or blue.” It’s really fascinating stuff. You can check out all of Lee’s videos here, or read his blog here.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Last month, on the opening day of 
