Lately it feels like everywhere I look obscure old films are being dusted off and presented to eager publics. Even a right-wing newspaper like London’s Telegraph had cause last November to speak of a “repertory boom” in the city where I live, deeming it “the year’s most unlikely media trend.” Their idea of what this looks like is a bit different than mine; not everyone is “suddenly” lining up to see Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

“The night he died I was in a north London nightclub, where I took heroin for the first time. I returned to my south London flat the next morning, threw up, and went straight in to work, where someone immediately told me about his death.” This fragment, the 421st of the 450 that comprise Ian Penman’s engaging new book Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors, strikes me as something much more than a “where were you when…” sort of anecdote.

The sleep of reason produces monsters—or so said Francisco Goya, who used the phrase as the title of an aquatint published in 1799. The words appear as if etched into the side of a desk, atop of which a male figure slumps in slumber. From behind him, the menace comes: bats, owls, and cats emerge from the darkness with petrifying gazes, crowding around the man.

Cherchez la femme, they say. It sounds nice, but what this expression actually means is that woman is the root of all (male) problems, always to blame. Claudia von Alemann’s extraordinary Blind Spot (Die Reise nach Lyon, 1980), recently restored by the Deutsche Kinemathek in cooperation with the Institut Lumière, is a rare film that puts the pursuit of a woman at its heart—not so that she can be punished, not so that a man’s troubles can be explained, but so that her achievements might be rescued from oblivion and might, in the process, change another woman’s life.

By Erika Balsom for RMC 1.  It was a total coincidence and yet it felt freighted with meaning: when I returned to the cinema at the end of August after months of suffering with the small screen, the first two films I saw began with crowd scenes.  The streets of London were eerily empty as…

The trope of a woman removing her glasses to suddenly reveal her great beauty is as familiar as it is eye-roll-inducing. She never looks that different, but her status as an erotic object changes immediately and immensely. A classic example is Dorothy Malone as a bookstore clerk in The Big Sleep (1946), but more recently there is Rachel Leigh Cook descending the stairs to the saccharine sounds of “Kiss Me” in She’s All That (1999). Give up your active gaze, this convention seems to say, and you will be alluring.

By Erika Balsom Diamonds are sharp and hard, rich in myth and violence, soaked in desire, totally under the putrid spell of money. They are, in other words, a lot like Las Vegas—especially as it appears in Nina Menkes’ searing 1991 film Queen of Diamonds. Across 75 taut minutes, Sin City’s fabulous hedonism recedes from…

By Erika Balsom  Published in Cinema Scope #79 (Summer 2019) For Scotland’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Charlotte Prodger delivered the final installment in a trilogy of films begun with Stoneymollan Trail (2015) and her Turner Prize-winning BRIDGIT (2016). SaF05 is named after a maned lioness, a rare creature in Botswana that adopts typically male…

By Erika Balsom I wouldn’t wish living in times like these on anyone. This, of course, is the irony of the title of Ralph Rugoff’s exhibition for this year’s Venice Biennale, “May You Live in Interesting Times.” On the surface, the phrase reads as a blessing; actually, it is a curse. Add to this the…

By Erika Balsom The Normandy village of Pirou-Plage almost became a holiday destination. In 1990, property developer Pier Invest launched a plan to build a hotel, two tennis courts, and 80 vacation homes. The initiative would transform the built environment and economy of this seaside area of 1,500 inhabitants—but not as anticipated or desired. Within…