But art and love are a matter of mouths open in cinnabar, of blackness and redness turned to velvet by assiduous grinding, of understanding the colors that benefit from being rubbed softly one into the other: the least that the practice will make you is skillful: beyond which there’s originality… This is all in Cennini’s handbook for painters, as well as the strict instruction that we must always take pleasure from our work.  

— Ali Smith, How to Be Both

Georges Rivière is haughty. Like he smelled something bad. The script? 

Here, in 1964’s Castle of Blood, playing a penurious dandy silly enough to spend the night in a haunted castle on a bet, Rivière seems to think aloofness will be all the protection he needs. It won’t be! Indeed, only one thing can save the film’s leading man from the visual shibboleths of a dying genre, and that’s the cameraman. 

Camera artisan Riccardo Pallottini, playing savior and tormentor, coaxes Rivière onward while punishing his progress. Nobody would be more surprised than the late Signore Pallottini himself hearing his cinematography praised as “experimental.” And yet, this is Gothic Horror’s greatest master shot — a case of push and pull, whose tension and elasticity continue to create rebounding space 118 years after its creator’s birth: so praise it we shall.

With ace cameramen, point-of-view becomes a more problematic concept, as when George O'Brien wanders glazed through F.W. Murnau’s swamp in Sunrise. There, the camera sometimes recedes from the hero’s advance, sometimes lets him pass and follows him, sometimes loses him altogether to rediscover him later. While Castle of Blood’s cliches would seem to be the thumpingly obvious point — a door’s creaking swing illuminates a wall bristling with harnesses and cartwheels… zoom in as a black kitten abandons its lair in a piece of spangly lacework… an organ wheezes as the hero’s sputtering candle casts the impossible shadow of itself on the crumbling masonry — those same hackneyed moments synthesize utterly unexpectedly into cinema pur.

Throughout our history, we’ve always been instructed to be terrified of one diabolical  group of outsiders or another. Pick any era, and it can be identified in part by who or what we were fretting over—anarchists, communists, the Japanese, the Italians, Satanic child molesters, terrorists. But over that same period, as all those other fears came and went, one remained constant and true, and only one: we have always been absolutely terrified of our teenagers. Why do they act like that? Why do they talk like that? Why are they so rebellious and sullen? What the hell have they got to be sullen about? And that godawful music! Time was these were all undeniable symptoms that our kids were using drugs, experimenting with sex, or hanging out with a tough crowd. Nowadays the dominant unspoken question seems to be “When is my kid gonna shoot up his school?” The context has changed, the methodology has changed, but ultimately that question is merely a slight variation on the same question American adults have been asking all along.

The credits of Hotel du Nord ripple on moving water; images of circulation and fluid connection flow through the film. It is set on the banks of the Canal St. Martin in Paris—not a river like those that run through Renoir’s work, but a quiet backwater, a workaday artery that offers passage and movement but not escape or purification. In the film’s opening scene, guests at a dinner party talk about blood transfusions, a subject brought up by Prosper (Bernard Blier), an overweight and comically self-serious man who picks up extra money by selling his blood. One woman says she would be disgusted by the thought of her blood in someone else’s body, while another retorts that blood is blood. With heavy irony, a third person objects that the topic is inappropriate conversation for a First Communion celebration. The communion hints at something no one in the film ever quite achieves: transformation.

The characters in Hotel du Nord (1938), all residents of the eponymous boarding house, are frustrated dreamers in cramped, confining quarters. But their lives and identities have fluidity and mutability; despite their tendencies toward suicide and romantic passivity, they’re not automatons of fate. Neither are they independent agents or authors of their own lives. They just muddle along.

At the center of the film lies a bungled double suicide. While the First Communion party grows livelier, a morose young couple, Pierre and Renée (Jean-Pierre Aumont and Annabella), check into the hotel intending to die together. Pallidly beautiful, they lie on the bed in an ecstasy of morbid romanticism, imagining their deaths as a honeymoon trip, an escape to freedom, a crossing over to “the other side.” Throughout the film, characters dream of travel and departure, but never go anywhere. The prostitute Raymonde (Arletty) says that the happiest day of her life was when she “embarked” on a boat ride on the Seine. Later, when she and her lover Edmond (Louis Jouvet) are packing for a trip to Toulouse, she tells the maid in lavish detail about the pleasures of traveling with Edmond—then reveals that she’s never been anywhere with him. Much later, Edmond travels to Marseilles with Renée, who survived the botched suicide attempt, and as they plan to take a boat to Port Saïd, she repeats the speech about escape and crossing over that her lover made before shooting her.

Pierre, a self-confessed coward, loses his nerve after shooting Renée, and believing that he’s killed her, flees the hotel. Despite his shame and self-loathing, he can’t bring himself to leap off a railway bridge either, and he turns himself in to the police. (The bridge scene, with its tangle of rails shining in the dark and steam from a locomotive engulfing the thwarted jumper, is a template for similar scenes in Act of Violence and Night has a Thousand Eyes.) Renée is surprisingly ready to forgive his failures, pointing out sensibly that it is easier to be shot than to shoot yourself. It’s Pierre who can’t live down the incident, telling her through the wire mesh of the prison visiting room that “It takes two to forget.”

When it is said that someone lives in their own world, it is often not meant kindly or admiringly, but Beatrice Lillie lived and worked very much in her own world like a child does at play, seemingly impervious to outside reaction or convention. If you “got” her no one was funnier, and in her heyday she was actually billed as “The Funniest Woman in the World,” all by herself. Why is someone funny, especially if you are not an easy laugher? Because of an element of surprise, or the swift introduction of something unexpected, and Lillie’s comic style was nothing but unexpected, aberrant, capricious.

On the afternoon of Monday, October 22nd, a staffer working at the Katonah, NY estate of liberal billionaire George Soros discovered a suspicious package someone had left near the mailbox. Opening the package and gleaning it contained a six-inch pipe bomb, he scurried it out to the nearby woods and called the police.

Americans haven’t always hated mimes. In the nineteenth century clowns and pantomimes, imported from Europe at first, were enormously popular here, and the American pantomime George L. Fox was one of the very most successful entertainers in the land during the decade after the Civil War. Although he was inspired by French pantomimes, his act was nothing like the Marcel Marceau whimsy we came to know and loathe in modern times. The Three Stooges in whiteface comes closer to the mark.

He was born in Boston on July 3 1826 and named George Washington Lafayette Fox, the eldest of six kids. The family prophetically nicknamed him Laff, which they pronounced Lahf, like the first syllable of Lafayette. His parents worked backstage at the Tremont Theatre, for a while the only one in Boston. They put their kids to work on the stage as the Little Foxes, singing, dancing, acting in their own variety shows and in others’ productions. Laff was considered less skilled and charismatic than some of his siblings and relegated to comic buffoonery. The Foxes later intermarried with another theater family, the Howards, to form a popular company that toured morally uplifting programs like The Drunkard to New England’s Puritan and temperance towns.

Not many actors paid their dues for as long and as hard as Boris Karloff did. Born William Henry Pratt near London in 1887, he was the self-described black sheep of his family (both of his parents were Anglo-Indian). In a photo at age three-and-a-half, he already looks alarmed by something, or by someone.

Pratt traveled to America to become an actor and changed his name so as not to embarrass his family. He played on stage in stock and learned through make-up how to become any character he wanted to be, much as Lon Chaney did. In between plays—and later in between films in the 1920s when he was slotted into many small and usually villainous roles—Karloff had to sometimes work as a day laborer or ditch-digger, which meant that he had problems with his back when he was an older man.

His 1920s villains were usually of Arab or Indian extraction, and his staring eyes and molded features lent themselves to glowering wickedness. Karloff very often didn’t get enough to eat in these years, which added to his impression of aesthetic gauntness. As a mesmerist in The Bells (1926), his best part in silent pictures, Karloff does mesmerize with abrupt gestures that he somehow slows down even before we have taken them in. Just watch the way he manages a very false slow smile, moving the corners of his mouth up and then tossing the smile contemptuously away. This shows an actor in tune with what the camera needs, and what it needed from him was menace.

In 1910, a boisterous, charismatic, and very funny15 year-old named Irving Lahrheim dropped out of high school in New York to join a burlesque comedy troupe. Everything about him was large, from his body to his personality. Combine that with his round face and flat features, his exaggerated accent, his pronounced lisp, and his broad, theatrical gestures, he was a presence ready-made for comedy—especially the kind of loud, obvious comedy that could hold a drunken, rowdy audience’s attention in between the strippers. Shortening his name to Bert Lahr, over the next 15 years he came to earn top billing around the Columbia Burlesque Circuit thanks in no small part to a routine he’d developed with actress and comedian Mercedes Delpino.

(This collage by André Breton, made up of phrases cut out from newspapers and assembled to make up a poem, was pasted into a copy of his book “Les Pas Perdus” which is now in private hands.)

Denise

Your eyes

The loveliest spot in France

Three stars on a

Submarine

Reveal

The harvest

Whether damned with faint praise or hidden away like baby cine-monsters in the attic, early talkies go largely unloved nowadays.

Is it a function of “class” (every iteration implied), this ghetto we’ve made, this undeservedly obscure and cramped compartment of moviedom?

Yes, I’ll defend the jangled rhythms and febrile mood swings of America “on the bum” merchandized, albeit unconsciously most of the time, by ‘30s Hollywood.

And later brushed aside by even more insidious machinery…

Canonical thinkers apparently haven’t any room in their social imagination for squalling. The cheapest magazine story on celluloid may suddenly evoke its Depression-era audience (unwashed bodies, injured pride, volcanic anger and all).

Genuine cynicism, meanwhile, tends to leave nonplussed film buffs in the dust.

I’m thinking of that human fever chart, Joan Blondell, under whose enormous “lamps” the whole world stands judged in stark, crummy relief.

No wonder she remains elusive to rankings (domain of momma’s boys), and to an increasingly centralized taste. Better to keep that looming collapse, our Great Manic-Depression, at bay…

An avenging conscience no séance would summon lightly, Blondell flies high above the Cultured Class and its decorous, dizzy noodle. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing perhaps the most precarious moment of his political career. He knows it. His allies know it. And his rivals—both within his coalition and across Israel's political spectrum—are preparing to capitalize on his growing weakness.

Former Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon, who also served as deputy prime minister between 2007 and 2009, is among the latest Israeli political figures to join a growing chorus of criticism directed at Netanyahu.

“In the final result,” Ramon said in an interview with Radio Galey, cited by the Israeli outlet Srugim, “we did not win.” He then broke down that failure in blunt terms: “We did not win in Lebanon, we did not win in Iran, and we did not win against Hamas.”

Another prominent critic is former Israeli army chief Gadi Eisenkot, who joined Netanyahu’s emergency war government following the events of October 7, 2023, before resigning with Benny Gantz in June 2024. 

Gaza requires urgent international attention. 

What is happening in the besieged and devastated Strip at the moment by far exceeds an unfolding humanitarian disaster; it is a calculated geopolitical reshaping. Israel is actively executing a plan to permanently occupy the vast majority of Gaza, with consequences that require little elaboration considering what we already know about the ongoing genocide.