Cléo from 5 to 7
By Essay Issue 93
Agnès Varda (1962) ASKING MYSELF ABOUT A FILM that helps us live better, I am immediately awash in a reel of images of the great films, art, novels, and plays that have changed me: art that has cracked my heart open, made me see the world anew or from another perspective, that has shed a…
Read MoreThe Hours
By Essay Issue 93
Stephen Daldry (2002) I WAS LIVING IN NEW YORK CITY on September 11, 2001, and for months afterward, I walked around in a strange daze, wondering what the hell had happened, what to do now, how to cope. The stench of smoke hung in the air, a constant reminder that the tragedy we’d all experienced…
Read MoreThree Colors: Blue
By Essay Issue 93
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…
Read MoreHiroshima Mon Amour
By Essay Issue 93
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…
Read MoreThe Film the World Needs Now: A Roundtable Discussion
By Essay Issue 93
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…
Read MoreListening to Silence
By Essay Issue 91
I ARRIVED AT THE ADVANCED screening of Martin Scorsese’s new film, Silence, in the worst possible frame of mind. I was running late, and I was starving. My only option for getting food in time was a fancy burger joint near the multiplex. After ordering a mega-burger and fries, I fidgeted at the table, waiting…
Read MoreThe Stock of Available Reality
By Essay Issue 26
A FEW months ago I received a letter which praised Image for “adding to the stock of available reality.” As I read that phrase, I felt a strange elation—not because it was intended as praise, but because it distilled a great deal of wisdom into very few words. Since the words were set off in…
Read MoreScreening Mystery
By Essay Issue 20
FOR nearly a generation in Hollywood, a gulf has existed between the secular and religious perspectives. It is a rift that appeared in the sixties for many reasons, not least as an expression of a cultural rebellion which was arguably both liberating and destructive. But one result was the lamentable loss on screen of an…
Read MorePicturing the Passion
By Essay Issue 41
NOW THAT Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has reached thousands of screens around the world and the frenzy of editorializing, pre- and post-release, has died down, two of the early questions about the film have been answered. Once the film entered the public domain, most of the fears about whether the film was…
Read MoreFully Human
By Essay Issue 60
LAST NIGHT I watched—mesmerized, despite its near three-hour length—Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, a minimalist science fiction epic set in a dreary, bombed-out industrial wasteland. The title does not derive from the contemporary connotation of sexual predator, but goes back to the sort of guide who leads hunters to where game can be found. In fact,…
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