First Impressions: Thinking Aloud About Film

https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/06/12/thinking-aloud-about-film-arrebato-ivan-zulueta-1979/

A cult film; a queer film; a vampire film; a film maudit; a film about film; a film about drugs; a film about film as a drug; a film that deserves to be better known. Audiences will recognise many of Almodóvar’s collaborators from his earliest works (Cecilia Roth, Eusebio Poncela, Luis Ciges, Will More; Ángel Luis Fernádez is the dop) and the voice of Almódovar himself. A genre film that transforms into an auteur film. A film of the Movida and a film of the transition. A film that embodies and evokes one era but that gained traction in another. A cinephile’s film about addiction where one delights in being bitten by drugs and cinema even as that bite becomes transformative and potentially deadly. An avant-garde experiment encased in a genre film. A trawl through the underground that aimed at the mainstream. A film to see and discuss.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/06/06/jose-arroyo-in-conversation-with-james-taylor-on-the-superhero-blockbuster-adaptation-style-and-meaning/

Just as the Superhero film loses centrality in the culture there comes a book that is not only a brilliant accounting of the various strategies of adaptations the mode engages with but also offers a methodology that will be of interest and use to anyone engaged with the analysis of visual media:  not only a brilliant book, but an important one. In this podcast we talk about what it is that is being adapted when discussing comic book characters that have so many iterations across different media. We talk about modes of seriality; the translation of the illusion of movement across media; the significance of bodies in spaces and movement in the mode; intertextuality, kaleidoscopic irruptions; how the move to digital affected issues of realism and reflexivity; restorative and reflective nostalgia; how the works compress, hierarchize and create continuities; the dramatization of alternate timelines….and we return over and over again to the hierarchization of gendered, racialised and sexualised bodies in dialogue with past iterations, current politics, contemporary formal strategies and more. I can't imagine future explorations of audiovisual work engaged with adapting any form of Intellectual Property, characters or worlds uninformed by THE SUPERHERO BLOCKBUSTER: ADAPTATION, STYLE AND MEANING.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/05/30/thinking-aloud-about-film-le-jour-se-leve-marcel-carne-1939/

We discuss Marcel Carné's superb Daybreak/ Le Jour se lève, which we saw at the Garden Cinema as part of their wonderful Film Noir International programme.

In the podcast we discuss the film as an example of ‘Poetic Realism’; as one of the first films to be described as a ‘film noir’; as an expression of the Popular Front sentiment and how the film’s reception aligned with reviewers’ political views. In relation to the film, we discuss the significance of its structure, the precision of the decor and mise-se-en-scène where it seems every object in François room subsequently comes into play to describe loss, longing, love, innocence since tarnished. I have made a compilation of all the times Gabin looks out the bullet-riddled window and outside. As the day rises and the night ends so does François’ life. We discuss Gabin, Arletty, Jules Berry…all at their best. Gabin is the representative everyman with nothing to live for but more sand in his lungs. It’s not only that as Georges Altman writes, ‘the whole of the working class is etched in Gabin’s face’ it’s that Gabin’s IS the face of the whole of the French working classes. He is François,. She is Françoise. Together they represent the oppression of the French working class. They are everyman and everywoman, orphaned by capitalism. This is a film not only about doomed love but a protest against class-as-destiny, one of the film’s most worked-through themes.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/05/25/one-second-zhang-yimou-2020/

Zhang Yimou’s very beautiful film has things to say about the cultural revolution and Chinese History and other things we’re not best placed to discuss. However, it is also about cinema: it’s lure, it’s power, its enchantments and its fragility; and Zhang Yimou’s magisterial mise-en-scène embodies its themes through its medium as if in the process of unfurling from an editing sweet, to a projector and onto a screen.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/04/18/jose-arroyo-in-conversation-with-diego-cepeda-on-outskirts/

I recently discovered the existence of a new and exciting film magazine: OUTSKIRTS. It’s in English, though mostly written by people for whom English is a second language or who don’t speak English at all: translation, in multiple senses, is an integral part of the magazine. It’s a handsome physical object, originating in the Locarno Critics Academy but speaking a different film culture, off-centre, from the margins or the periphery. In this podcast I talk to one of the editors, Diego Cepeda (the others are Nathan Latoré, Sofie Cato Maas, Raymond Shik and Christopher small), with filmmaker/critic Felix Cordero Bello contributing illuminating contexts and asides.

Near the beginning of the podcast Diego cites a poem by Farid Ud-din Attar,

‘The birds had departed towards a distant luminosity that attracted them.

Those who did not perish on the way would understand upon arrival that they had been transformed into that light that now attracted others’.

OUTSKIRTS is a magazine that is itself, embodies, a romance of movies, film culture, film history, woven through with friendship. It aims to put at the centre marginalised filmmakers and film cultures; and asks its readers to slow down, look back, look deeply, and think. The launch of each issue is accompanied by live events, often including readings and screenings. Diego cites Abraham Polonsky at the end, ‘The only fights worth fighting are for lost causes’.

Speaking to Diego and Felix, in English, a second language for them, a whole cinema culture comes alive. They cite LA VIDA UTIL and Lucía Salas as an inspiration: a spirit of sharing knowledge, friendship and dialogue, enthusiasm for cinema, a similar way of thinking about film history. Diego and Felix both also write for Simulacro magazine edited by Julia Scrive-Loyer (https://www.simulacromag.com/) participate in its weekly cine-club and are connected to the Chavón School of Film and Design, itself associated with Parsons, with Diego as one of its key lecturers. ‘How can we approach the history of images and sounds from a place that maybe didn’t have (a film industry) but we have to create tools for understanding those elements that did exist (newsreels, home movies, a rich culture of filmgoing)’, says Diego.

The conversation ranges from the origins of the magazine, it’s aims (to defend cinema from this place, that is on the margins), it’s focus (to shine a light on the overlooked), how each issues tries to create a thread of thought. We detour through a brief account of a history of cinema in the Dominican Republic, where the conversation took place. All this and much more can be listened to in the podcast below:

The new issue comes out in June and can be purchased at: https://outskirtsmag.com/

Such a pleasure to talk to Paul Cuff on Robert Egger’s version of NOSFERATU. He knos so much that the discussion of the film unfurls into a discussion of the various other versions, Murnau’s original (1922), Herzog’s version (1979), David Lee Fisher’s version (2023), and onto the films of Guy Maddin, Pablo Berger’s BLANCA NIEVES (2012), various versions of THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE and even THE ARTIST (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011), which Paul loathes. We were entertained by, enjoyed -- with reservations -- the rich visual world of Egger’s version, the thick and dense sound, and we praise Nicholas Hoult as the emotional anchor of the film. But Paul articulates his uncertainty about whether the film was a parody of itself or the genre or Nosferatu in its various incarnations. The film seems to be drawing on Murnau, Herzog, Caspar Friedrich’s paintings. But it seems to create a world in which God ostensibly exists but no one seems to believe in the ideology that would sustain this. Paul notes with interest on how Eggers credits the screenplay of the original Nosferatu but not Murnau, the director. Paul highlights how Nosferatu was itself a rip-off of Bram Stoker’s work and the significance of the titles of the most prominent version (Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (Murnau) and the German title of Herzog’s version,

Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night.) What all versions have in common is that they’re all about sex and death, all about sex and the maiden; all versions have

Nosferatu as a sexual figure as well as a figure of death and pestilence, How does Egger’s version sit on the shoulder of previous versions and what does it add to them? We discuss our love of the performances of Max Schrek and Klaus Kinski and much more in the podcast below:

We discuss Visconti’s final film, currently available to see through the BFI streaming service, in conjunction with the Visconti season recently held at the Southbank, and in a lush and lovely print. Richard had to convince me to podcast on this and I’m glad we did. We both think it a great film, without being anywhere near Visconti’s greatest, a measure of the director’s extraordinary achievements. Here we discuss it in relation to D’Annunzzio’s original novel (The Intruder is the literal translation of the novel’s Italian title); the lushness of décor and costuming, which sometimes seem a John Singer Sargent painting come to life; how the mise-en-scène vividly and complexly conveys character feeling, often without dialogue, and with such skill it can make a viewer swoony with admiration; we talk of how Alain Delon and Romy Schneider were originally cast and admire the performances of Giancarlo Giannini, Jennifer O’Neill, Laura Antonelli and Rina Morelli. It was also lovely to (barely) recognise Massimo Girotti, so beautiful in OSSESSIONE, as one of Giannini’s rivals for Jennifer O’Neill’s favours. We discuss the auction scene,and the fencing scene between husband lover in some detail; how the film reminds us of the 19th century novel in its narrative sweep, melodramatic accents and its dramatization of complex ideas (faith vs science, moral actions in a world without God, marriage vs free love, equality between the sexes, etc.). A world of feeling and desire, fuelled by melodrama; a beautiful film slightly marred by its ending. We discuss all of this and more here:

The BFI’s screenings of JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 COMMERCE QUAY, 1080 BRUXELLES were all sold out. Luckily, we were both able to see it on a big screen elsewhere. In this podcast we discuss why this is a film to see on a big screen, how it remains a radical film, how the first scene sets a context, how Jeanne Dielman lives in a pimped world where the very same money she gets from men she gives to men. We discuss how the bare bones of the story could have been done as melodrama or noir and the significance of rendering it as ‘slow cinema’, including all that’s been left out of cinema previously (the various kinds of women’s work). We admire the three-day structure as well as the formal rigour and precision which creates Dielman’s world and Ackerman’s point-of-view on it; how the film puts into play elements that are never rendered explicit (is the son gay?). We also discuss Delphine Seyrig, the muse insoumise, in the light of her art-house and activist careers (the program for the Queen Sofia exhibition on her work and career is in the blogpost); the film itself in the context of Second Wave Feminism; how the film remains radical in that it is simultaneously a depiction of what Tate brothers bros think women should be, a refutation of those ideas, and women’s frustration/ explosion/ revenge in response. A film that is almost half a century old and feels continuously relevant

Tsui Hark’s SHANGHAI BLUES (1984), starring Kenny Bee, Sylvia Chang and Sally Yeh, is currently playing on MUBI. A commercial romantic comedy with musical numbers galore and lots of screwball and slapstick, the film is easy to like. We discuss the pleasures in the performers, the interwar Shanghai setting, the beauty of its look and design, the inventiveness of its shot design and composition. We note how rare it is to see a look designed purely to please instead of to evoke, convey and signify in contemporary cinema. Might this also be a limitation? The film feels like a quickly executed trifle. It’s very broad and the execution feels a bit clunky. We were nonetheless both charmed by it though Richard rated it a bit higher than I did. Where we intersect and where we diverge is the subject of the podcast.

We didn’t manage to get to much of the recent Luchino Visconti retrospective at BFI South Bank but we somehow wanted to mark the moment, and how better than a discussion of BELLISSIMA (1951), particularly through the great Eureka/ Masters of Cinema blu-ray. We discuss its themes of obsession, mother love, fantasy, cinema, the effects of media on private and collective aspirations; how it’s a film that announces its fluency from the opening shots; its relation to neo-realism through on-location shooting and the use of non-professional actors; Anna Magnani’s tour de force performance, drawing particular attention to the scene where she gets the neighbours involved in the beating by her husband; we note how it’s an unusual film for Visconti in that it’s central role is a woman’s role, a vehicle for Magnani; we discuss the elements of camp, something not usually associated with Visconti; a very entertaining film of great depth; a critique of cinema by one of its greatest exponents; a film one can’t imagine bettered; a film worth seeing