Month: November 2018

Favorite Directors

Ryan Swen Lists
  1. David Lynch
  2. Edward Yang
  3. Wong Kar-wai
  4. Hong Sang-soo
  5. Jacques Rivette
  6. Orson Welles
  7. Jean-Luc Godard
  8. Tsai Ming-liang
  9. Alain Resnais
  10. Chris Marker

Pantheon Directors

  • Robert Bresson
  • Carl Theodor Dreyer
  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder
  • Jean-Luc Godard
  • Howard Hawks
  • Hong Sang-soo
  • King Hu
  • Jia Zhangke
  • Fritz Lang
  • David Lynch
  • Terrence Malick
  • Michael Mann
  • Chris Marker
  • Yasujiro Ozu
  • Alain Resnais
  • Jacques Rivette
  • Eric Rohmer
  • Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet
  • Tsai Ming-liang
  • Apichatpong Weerasethakul
  • Orson Welles
  • Wong Kar-wai
  • Edward Yang

The Far Side of Paradise

  • Chantal Akerman
  • Wes Anderson
  • Hideaki Anno
  • Bi Gan
  • Claude Chabrol
  • Brian De Palma
  • Jacques Demy
  • Claire Denis
  • Marguerite Duras
  • Louis Feuillade
  • John Ford
  • Hollis Frampton
  • Hal Hartley
  • Alfred Hitchcock
  • Hou Hsiao-hsien
  • Chuck Jones
  • Abbas Kiarostami
  • Akira Kurosawa
  • Kiyoshi Kurosawa
  • Mariano Llinás
  • Elaine May
  • Kenji Mizoguchi
  • F.W. Murnau
  • Nagisa Oshima
  • Satyajit Ray
  • Jean Renoir
  • Steven Spielberg
  • Johnnie To
  • Jacques Tourneur
  • François Truffaut

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.