Ballet without music, without anybody, without anything

('Ballet sans musique, sans personne, sans rien' by Rémo Forlani, Cahiers du Cinema 160, November 1964)

The issue, isn't it, lies in being "in". Take, for instance, this elderly lady who scribbles in the Catholic press, or that elderly gentleman who incessantly tears down "new wave" films in a daily paper... They watched the Beatles' film and they liked it. They were ecstatic, like the sock-hoppers at Carnegie Hall, like the yéyés at…

The Warriors of Yore

('Les guerriers d’antan' by Koichi Yamada, Cahiers du Cinema 180, July 1966)

In crafting "Throne of Blood" (based on Shakespeare) — along with "The Idiot" (based on Dostoevsky, 1951) and "The Lower Depths" (based on Gorki, 1957) — Kurosawa had a specific goal: to introduce the audience to literature and Shakespeare. Consequently, he needed to create an adaptation that served as a model of rigor and fidelity to the chosen foreign work. He aimed to set…

Francois Truffaut: 'A Wonderful Certainty'

('L'irable Certitude', Cahiers du Cinema 46, April 1955, written under the pseudonym Robert Lachenay)

We made our discovery of Nicholas Ray seven or eight years ago with Knock on Any Door. Then at the 'Biarritz Rendez-vous' we had a dazzling confirmation in They Live By Night, which is still unmistakably his best film. Later In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground and The Lusty Men were released in Paris at one time or another -…

L'hélice et l'idée by Eric Rohmer (Cahiers du Cinema, March 1959, N° 93)

Itself, by itself, solely ONE everlastingly, and single. – Plato

We would have gladly pardoned Alfred Hitchcock for following the austere The Wrong Man with a lighter work, more of a crowd pleaser. Such was perhaps his intention when he decided to bring the novel by Boileau and Narcejac, D’entre les morts, to the screen. Now, the esoteric nature of Vertigo, so they say, repelled Americans. French…