More on: Essays

Stan Brakhage (1959) IN THE WINTER OF 2014, I was teaching a course in the history of experimental film at the University of Tennessee. I primarily make fictional films, and I’m no scholar of avant-garde cinema, but a colleague had fallen ill and I had been asked to cover the course. I was happy to…

Krzysztof Kieślowski (1993) DO YOU FEEL ABLE TO TALK? is the first full line in Three Colors: Blue, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece of a meditation on grief and liberation. “Were you conscious during the….” is the next. The doctor is unable to finish the question he poses to a woman who has just lost her husband…

Richard Linklater (2014) MY YOUNGEST DAUGHTER, a recent college graduate, moved out of our house—her childhood home—into her first apartment this week. I am thrilled for her, a little sad for me. Her passage into adult life seems like an auspicious time to be writing about Boyhood, which brilliantly and poignantly follows the trajectory of…

Alain Resnais (1959) The word became flesh—and then through theologians it became words again. SO SAID KARL BARTH, one of the great theologians of the twentieth century. Something similar can be said of films—scriptwriting becomes cinema, then through essayists it becomes writing again. And so here I am, a filmmaker, writing about films which I…

An Introduction: What Makes a Film Great? MY FRIEND THE ARCHITECT COLIN FRASER WISHART says that the purpose of his craft is to help people live better. There’s beautiful simplicity but also enormous gravity in that statement. Just imagine if every public building, city park, urban transportation hub, and home were constructed with the flourishing…

When Gareth Higgins talked with Debra Granik, David Lowery, James Ponsoldt, and Alissa Wilkinson, the compilation of this special image of Image was drawing to a close. It was a perfect time to ask three contemporary filmmakers and a critic to reflect on the current moment. Granik, the adaptor-director of Winter’s Bone, is as much…

not beautiful photography, not beautiful images, but necessary images…                                                                 —Robert Bresson FOR YEARS I’VE WRESTLED with this seemingly straightforward declaration from the notebook of revered French film director Robert Bresson (a small book, but a bounty of inspiration). I’ve wanted to believe in his “necessary images” and therefore aspire to create them. To use…

WHEN The Kingdom landed on my desk with a thud, I could tell that it would pose a challenge—that it would be a book I had to contend with. In addition to being a substantial tome, it comes with the cultural imprimatur conveyed by its publisher, the venerable Farrar, Straus and Giroux, whose backlist includes…