Chelsea the Cinéaste

As a leading figure of Italian Modernist cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni made films that defy facile understanding. With their sharp deviations from conventional approach to storytelling, and a freewheeling style of filmmaking as constituted by a propensity of interspersing main events with disparate incidents, many of Antonioni’s famous works, including  L’Avventura ,  La Notte , and  L’Eclisse , are bold statements of a revolutionary redefinition of cinematic art. It was with an incredible sense of audacity and surprisingly little resistance that, straight after the making of  L’Eclisse , the reception of which was, much like the other two that preceded it, a mixture of raves and rants, Antonioni undertook his first venture to the realm of polychromatic film. The result was  Red Desert  (1964), a stunning classic that looks hardly like the director’s inaugural attempt at an unexplored medium, in which the colours, though appear bizarrely gaudy a...

Henry James’s  The Turn of the Screw  has sparked disputes over years with largely two sides of critics endeavouring to constitute a tenable interpretation of this canonic ghost story. Edmund Wilson, who had recanted his views incessantly, ultimately settled on the proposition that the ghosts in the story are non-existent and merely conjured up by the hyperimaginative, delusional governess. Countering that line of thought is Brad Leithauser, who chooses not to dismiss the probability of supernatural occurrences, but also considers the process of arriving at a definitive conclusion especially problematic when taken into account that the story is recalled by a possibly deranged mind. But what is James’s stance on this? Inkling can be deduced from the preface to his last ghost story, “The Jolly Corner,” according to which the author expresses his preference for ghosts that are extensions of everyday reality: “… the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of th...

Wallace Stevens writes in “Imagination as Value”: “The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before reason has established them.” Both imagination and reason are the chief mechanisms of constructing our worldview: postulated first by imagination and henceforth affirmed by reason. Elsewhere Stevens talks of noble art as “imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality,” acknowledging creativity as the potential force of disentangling men from the fetters of mundanity. These two meditative epigrams posit our perceptions of the world as shaped largely by imagination- not that of a virginal imagination perhaps but one that is refined by the developing of a cognition. But, one may ask, what is the genesis of our cognition? Is it yet another product of the imaginative faculty? Or is it also partly in thrall to the tyranny of reason? In the midst of such paradoxical argument a plausible interpretation arises: imagination and reason are, in essence, two s...

In  Life ’s feature on the bizarre case of Christopher Emmanuel “Manny” Balestrero, a bashful, honest, family-loving string bass player of the then snazzy Stork Club, who was arrested for crimes he never committed, Herbert Brean, the writer, supposes the inconceivable event possessing the “somnambulist quality of a bad dream.” Alfred Hitchcock, basing a film on the incident three years later, conferred on the “bad dream” a touch of Kafkaesque disquietude. Though jettisoning much of the suspenseful streak that characterises his style, Hitchcock introduces in  The Wrong Man  (1956) a new suspense that is induced by a palpable sense of emotional detachedness. For years to come this would ultimately evolve to a semi-documentary approach of impassive-observing that culminates in the menacing sobriety of Psycho . To enhance the desperation of a tangled, never-ending nightmare, Hitchcock pardonably distorts a few facts to give rise to the dramatic. In the film, Manny’s ...

Frank Capra’s  It Happened One Night  (1934) comes as a perfect antidote to the seemingly endless crises and depression of present age. It celebrates love and happiness at their incorruptible states; affirms the existence and possible prevalence of “pure-at-hearts” goodness, and restores hope to a world that has shown signs of incurable damages. Even when seeing the film now under a slightly different social context, its counter-Depression positivism can seem at times too implausible a pipe dream. Ellie’s (Claudette Colbert) utilitarian kindness towards the hunger-stricken mother and son is largely induced by and acted on the strength of Peter’s (Clark Gable) disposition to boastful jests- he flaunts the money and pretends to be a millionaire; she responds on cue and squeezes that money into the hand of the son. Ironies like this indicate a discrepancy between the privileged and the destitute that is only going to widen: charitable instincts come more easily for those who...

Now widely regarded as an epoch-making masterpiece, premonitory of the rise of Italian modernism, Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954) suffered a thorough drubbing in its box office, though was greatly admired by auteurs like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. The film is, at its core, a bracing study on the fraught relationship of reverse elements- George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman played a British couple journeying to Naples to sell an inherited property; the husband is a stolid rationalist whilst the wife a sensitive romantic. Their glaring disharmony is more acted out through their overt disdain for one another; both are susceptible, the moment they touch down the foreign land, to the immaturity of making each other jealous to express their longing for mutual understanding. Amongst many of the couples’ venomous exchanges, the wife, on one occasion, recalls a past fancy for a now-deceased poet, to which the aggrieved husband responds derisively: “He was a fool… [...

M (1931) was Fritz Lang’s first attempt at sound cinema, after an impressive corpus of silent classics including the Dr. Mabuse trilogy and Metropolis , the highly expressionist style of which earned him the epithet- the “Master of Darkness.” To be making films during the dawn of sound era, the filmmakers had the privilege and the license of exploring many unchartered territories- the effects of sound as incorporated with motions and images was a vitalising experimentation for many; given the luck and the inherent ingenuity an innovative work of art was engendered. Such is not to write off the many legendary figures as merely “chancing upon” innovations whilst experimenting without a definite aim, but to underline Lang’s remarkable assurance and skill of tackling a new medium like an old hand- as a seasoned auteur whose previous films were noted for their austerity of technique and style, Lang, throughout his long career, never once explored or experimented like a reckless adven...