Month: November 2018

Favorite Directors

Ryan Swen Lists
  1. Edward Yang
  2. David Lynch
  3. Wong Kar-wai
  4. Hong Sang-soo
  5. Jacques Rivette
  6. Tsai Ming-liang
  7. King Hu
  8. Alain Resnais
  9. Éric Rohmer
  10. Johnnie To

Pantheon Directors

  • Apichatpong Weerasethakul
  • Robert Bresson
  • Adam Curtis
  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder
  • Louis Feuillade
  • Hollis Frampton
  • Jean-Luc Godard
  • Hamaguchi Ryūsuke
  • Hal Hartley
  • Howard Hawks
  • Hong Sang-soo
  • Hou Hsiao-hsien
  • King Hu
  • Jia Zhangke
  • Kurosawa Akira
  • Kurosawa Kiyoshi
  • Fritz Lang
  • Lau Kar-leung
  • David Lynch
  • Michael Mann
  • Chris Marker
  • Mizoguchi Kenji
  • Ōbayashi Nobuhiko
  • Ozu Yasujirō
  • Alain Resnais
  • Jacques Rivette
  • Éric Rohmer
  • Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet
  • Johnnie To
  • Tsai Ming-liang
  • Josef von Sternberg
  • Wong Kar-wai
  • Edward Yang

The Far Side of Paradise

  • Chantal Akerman
  • Paul Thomas Anderson
  • Wes Anderson
  • Anno Hideaki
  • Bi Gan
  • Luis Buñuel
  • Claude Chabrol
  • Brian De Palma
  • Jacques Demy
  • Claire Denis
  • Carl Theodor Dreyer
  • Marguerite Duras
  • John Ford
  • Alfred Hitchcock
  • Sammo Hung
  • Chuck Jones
  • Abbas Kiarostami
  • Mariano Llinás
  • Terrence Malick
  • Elaine May
  • F.W. Murnau
  • Ōshima Nagisa
  • Christian Petzold
  • Satyajit Ray
  • Kelly Reichardt
  • Jean Renoir
  • Michael Snow
  • Steven Spielberg
  • Jacques Tourneur
  • François Truffaut
  • Tsui Hark
  • Orson Welles
  • John Woo

November 2018 Capsules

Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
One of the most subtly yet immediately poignant moments in this masterwork comes midway through the film, when Jeanne is drinking coffee in a café. After she finishes and pays, she puts her elbow on the table and pauses, looking to her right with that placid yet fundamentally unreadable expression that she wears for nearly the entire film. It is the first — if not the last — time that the next step in her routine is not readily apparent to the audience, when she is given the chance to stop and ponder. Its brevity (it lasts less than twenty seconds) and its placement both within a larger shot and a larger sequence (she has just bought some yarn to continue knitting a sweater for her son) is emblematic of everything that this film accomplishes, everything that it evokes and embodies.