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Au Hasard Balthazar
''Au hasard Balthazar'' (; meaning "Balthazar, at Random"), also known as ''Balthazar'', is a 1966 tragedy film directed by Robert Bresson. Believed to be inspired by a passage from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1868–69 novel ''The Idiot'', the film follows a donkey as he is given to various owners, most of whom treat him callously. Noted for Bresson's ascetic directorial style and regarded as a work of profound emotional effect, it is frequently listed as one of the greatest films of all time. Plot In the French countryside near the Pyrenees, a baby donkey is adopted by young children—Jacques and his sisters—who live on a farm. They baptize the donkey, christening it Balthazar, along with Marie, Jacques's childhood sweetheart, whose father is the teacher at the small school next door. When one of Jacques's sisters dies, his family vacates the farm, and Marie's family takes it over in an informal arrangement. The donkey is given to local farmhands, who work it relentlessly. Years p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson (; 25 September 1901 – 18 December 1999) was a French film director. Known for his ascetic approach, Bresson made a notable contribution to the art of cinema; his non-professional actors, Ellipsis (narrative device), ellipses, and sparse use of scoring have led his works to be regarded as preeminent examples of Minimalism, minimalist film. Much of his work is known for being tragic in story and nature. Bresson is among the most highly regarded filmmakers of all time. He has the highest number of films (seven) that made the 2012 ''Sight & Sound'' critics' poll of the 250 greatest films ever made. His works ''A Man Escaped'' (1956), ''Pickpocket (film), Pickpocket'' (1959) and ''Au hasard Balthazar'' (1966) were ranked among the top 100, and other films like ''Mouchette'' (1967) and (1983) also received many votes. Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "He is the French cinema, as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." Personal life ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jansenism
Jansenism was a 17th- and 18th-century Christian theology, theological movement within Roman Catholicism, primarily active in Kingdom of France, France, which arose as an attempt to reconcile the theological concepts of Free will in theology, free will and Grace in Christianity, divine grace in response to certain developments in the Catholic Church, but later developed political and philosophical aspects in opposition to Absolutism (European history), royal absolutism. It was based on the ideas of Cornelius Jansen, (1585-1638), a Dutch bishop, and his book ''Augustinus (Jansenist book), Augustinus''. Jansenists believed that God’s grace was the only way to salvation and that human free will had no role. Jansenists provoked lively debates, particularly in France, where five propositions, including the doctrines of limited atonement and irresistible grace, were extracted from the work and declared heretical by theologians hostile to Jansen. In 1653, Pope Innocent X condemned f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Quandt
James Quandt is a Canadian film historian and festival programmer, best known as the longtime head programmer of the TIFF Cinematheque program of film retrospectives.Geoff Pevere, "The ghosts of cinema Cinematheque summer series Cinematheque's summer program: James Quandt looks back on 20 years of bringing the world of art house home". ''Toronto Star'', June 3, 2010. Originally from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Quandt first moved to Toronto in the mid-1980s to work as curator of film screening series at the Harbourfront Centre. In 1990, when the Toronto International Film Festival took over management and operations of Gerald Pratley's Ontario Film Institute, Quandt was named Pratley's successor as head of the program, which was renamed Cinematheque later the same year. Exhibitions and retrospectives he has created for TIFF also frequently toured internationally. He has also been a regular contributor of film criticism and analysis to ''Artforum'' magazine and The Criterion Collection, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ingmar Bergman
Ernst Ingmar Bergman (14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish film and theatre director and screenwriter. Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential film directors of all time, his films have been described as "profoundly personal meditations into the myriad struggles facing the psyche and the soul". Among his most acclaimed works are ''The Seventh Seal'' (1957), ''Wild Strawberries (film), Wild Strawberries'' (1957), ''Persona (1966 film), Persona'' (1966) and ''Fanny and Alexander'' (1982), which were included in the The Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time 2012, 2012 edition of ''Sight & Sound'' Greatest Films of All Time. He was also ranked No. 8 on the magazine's 2002 "Greatest Directors of All Time" list. Other notable works include ''Sawdust and Tinsel'' (1953), ''A Lesson in Love (1954 film), A Lesson in Love'' (1954), ''Smiles of a Summer Night'' (1955), ''The Virgin Spring'' (1960), ''Through a Glass Darkly (film), Through a Glass Darkly' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York Times''. Together with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann, they established the F-R Publishing Company and set up the magazine's first office in Manhattan. Ross remained the editor until his death in 1951, shaping the magazine's editorial tone and standards. ''The New Yorker''s fact-checking operation is widely recognized among journalists as one of its strengths. Although its reviews and events listings often focused on the Culture of New York City, cultural life of New York City, ''The New Yorker'' gained a reputation for publishing serious essays, long-form journalism, well-regarded fiction, and humor for a national and international audience, including work by writers such as Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alice Munro. In the late ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael (; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for ''The New Yorker'' from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael often defied the consensus of her contemporaries. One of the most influential American film critics of her era, she left a lasting impression on the art form. Roger Ebert argued in an obituary that Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades". Kael, he said, "had no theory, no rules, no guidelines, no objective standards. You couldn't apply her 'approach' to a film. With her it was all personal." In a blurb for ''The Age of Movies'', a collection of her writings for the Library of America, Ebert wrote that "Like George Bernard Shaw, she wrote reviews that will be read for their style, humor and energy long after some of their subjects have been forgotten." For American readers, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris (October 31, 1928 – June 20, 2012) was an American film critic. He was a leading proponent of the auteur theory of film criticism. Early life Sarris was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, Themis (née Katavolos) and George Andrew Sarris, and grew up in Ozone Park, Queens. After attending John Adams High School in South Ozone Park (where he overlapped with Jimmy Breslin), he graduated from Columbia University in 1951 and then served for three years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, during the Korean War, before moving to Paris for a year, where he became a friend of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Upon returning to New York's Lower East Side, Sarris briefly pursued graduate studies at his alma mater and Teachers College, Columbia University before turning to film criticism as a vocation. Career After initially writing for '' Film Culture'', he moved to ''The Village Voice'' where his first piece—a laudatory review of '' Psycho' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of the longest-running newspapers in the United States, the ''Times'' serves as one of the country's Newspaper of record, newspapers of record. , ''The New York Times'' had 9.13 million total and 8.83 million online subscribers, both by significant margins the List of newspapers in the United States, highest numbers for any newspaper in the United States; the total also included 296,330 print subscribers, making the ''Times'' the second-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States, following ''The Wall Street Journal'', also based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' is published by the New York Times Company; since 1896, the company has been chaired by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, whose current chairman and the paper's publ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tom Milne
Tom Milne (2 April 1926 – 14 December 2005) was a British film critic. See also After war service, he studied English and French at Aberdeen University and later at the Sorbonne. Interested in the theatre too, he wrote for the magazine '' Encore'', which existed for a decade (1954 to 1965). Milne wrote for ''Sight & Sound'', the ''Monthly Film Bulletin'', ''The Observer'' and ''The Times'' during his career. During the 1960s he was associate editor of ''Sight & Sound'' and editor of the ''Monthly Film Bulletin''. His book length studies of film directors include monographs on Joseph Losey (1968) and Rouben Mamoulian (1969) in the Thames & Hudson Cinema One series, the former comprising a series of extended interviews with the director. He also wrote a short study on the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (1971) and edited and translated an anthology of interviews and writings on Jean-Luc Godard Jean-Luc Godard ( , ; ; 3 December 193013 September 2022) was a Frenc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard ( , ; ; 3 December 193013 September 2022) was a French and Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy. He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork. During his early career as a film critic for '' Cahiers du Cinéma'', Godard criticized mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality" and championed Hollywood directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. In response, he and like-minded critics began to make their own films, challenging the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema. Godard first received global acclaim for '' Breathless'' (1960), a milestone in t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chiaroscuro
In art, chiaroscuro ( , ; ) is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for the use of contrasts of light to achieve a sense of volume in modelling three-dimensional objects and figures. Similar effects in cinema, and black and white and low-key photography, are also called chiaroscuro. Taken to its extreme, the use of shadow and contrast to focus strongly on the subject of a painting is called tenebrism. Further specialized uses of the term include chiaroscuro woodcut for colour woodcuts printed with different blocks, each using a different coloured ink; and chiaroscuro for drawings on coloured paper in a dark medium with white highlighting. Chiaroscuro originated in the Renaissance period but is most notably associated with Baroque art. Chiaroscuro is one of the canonical painting modes of the Renaissance (alongside cangiante, sfumato and uni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Trial Of Joan Of Arc
''The Trial of Joan of Arc'' () is a 1962 French historical drama film written and directed by Robert Bresson. Florence Delay stars as Joan of Arc, a French military leader, who is undergoing a trial on the charge of heresy in 1431, during the Hundred Years' War. Synopsis In 1431 Jeanne d'Arc, a peasant girl who has led the French troops against the English during the third phase of the Hundred Years' War, is imprisoned for heresy and brought to trial by an pro-English court in Rouen. From the beginning of the trial it is made clear by English representatives that the sentence has to be Jeanne's execution by fire. Despite constant interrogations by the judges, Jeanne's faith in her mission, which she insists was assigned to her by God, remains unshaken. During the trial she is not only questioned but also tortured, her virginity examined, and molested. In a moment of weakness Jeanne recants her faith but later retracts her earlier confession. She is sentenced to death and burn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
