time of the wolf (some screenshots)

Trying to get back into the habit of capturing screenshots as part of my viewing practice. These are from Michael Haneke's piece of post-apocalyptic European grimness, Time of the Wolf:

recent film stills

I just put around 15 film stills from Woman in the Dunes (1964) up at the LiveJournal film_stills community. It's a beautifully-composed movie; hope you check 'em out.

recent film stills

So over the past few months I've been quietly participating in the film_stills community over at LiveJournal, largely posting stills from films that are visually interesting but which aren't Film Club picks, and which I don't plan to do formal write-ups for.

I just posted 21 screenshots from the recent American indie The Guatemalan Handshake (starring Will Oldham!); you can see them here.

I'm also pretty happy with my caps from the atmospheric French thriller Sombre.

You should be able to see these without being LiveJournal / film_stills members... maybe? And if you're interested in what I thought of these films, the best place to look is here...

visual grammar I

This month, the Gene Siskel Film Center has been doing a retrospective on Shohei Imamura, a director I'd heard about, but whose films I haven't seen. Because of bad weather and travel committments, I've missed every entry in the series, but it inspired me to Netflix one of his films (Vengeance Is Mine, 1979) and take another out from the library (The Pornographers, 1966).

I started with The Pornographers, which is a mightily impressive movie, in a number of different regards. The one I particularly want to focus on today is the way that Imamura composes for the screen. He seems to have an inexhaustible repetoire of inventive methods for dividing or compartmentalizing the frame, often in ways that focus our attention precisely or reveal relationships between characters. These screenshots probably say this better than I can:

After this, I'm really eager to see more Imamura films.