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Josef von Sternberg
Senses of Cinema - March 2002
Ironically, Dietrich, who became a frozen, unchanging icon, is applauded for transcending convention, whereas von Sternberg, who in seven films with Dietrich never had her repeat or resemble herself, has constantly been derided for imposing convention – for abandoning true cinematic art (evinced by his German Dietrich picture, Der blaue Engel) for the trashy pornography of tinsel Hollywood (evinced, in crescendo, by his six American Dietrich pictures). His centenary, in 1994,…
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Ford Till ’47
Senses of Cinema - April 2004
John Ford was born John Martin Feeney, February 1, 1894, at his father’s farm in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the child of Irish immigrants. The Irish were a ghettoised minority, then, and it was only toward the end of his life, Ford said, when Kennedy was elected president, that he felt like a first-class citizen. He grew up in Portland, where his father had a bar.
He sailed a boat, played football,…
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Passage: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln
1939, the year of Young Mr. Lincoln, was also the year of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) communes with The Lincoln Memorial to revive his faith in the Constitution. For people born in 1890s, like Ford and Capra, Abraham Lincoln was America. And Lincoln was part of themselves, like Christ. Somehow Lincoln sheltered them from the incalculable horror of their Civil War, a war commemorated in…
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1 March 2000
One would expect godless and nihilistic attitudes to be at antipodes with those of a very Catholic miracle play. In fact, this is not the case. Giovanna d'Arco al rogo ("Joan of Arc at the stake," 1955), Roberto Rossellini's mise en scène of an oratorio by Arthur Honegger and Paul Claudel modeled on medieval mystery plays,(1) draws Joan (Ingrid Bergman) up out of nowhere into a limbo, a blackness with stars, and sends her back into the…
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