Month: November 2018

Favorite Directors

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

Pantheon Directors

  • Robert Bresson
  • Jacques Demy
  • 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
  • Tsai Ming-liang
  • Orson Welles
  • Wong Kar-wai
  • Edward Yang

The Far Side of Paradise

  • Chantal Akerman
  • Wes Anderson
  • Bi Gan
  • Claude Chabrol
  • Claire Denis
  • Carl Theodor Dreyer
  • Marguerite Duras
  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder
  • Louis Feuillade
  • John Ford
  • Hollis Frampton
  • Hal Hartley
  • Alfred Hitchcock
  • Abbas Kiarostami
  • Akira Kurosawa
  • Kiyoshi Kurosawa
  • Mike Leigh
  • Richard Linklater
  • Elaine May
  • Lucrecia Martel
  • Kenji Mizoguchi
  • F.W. Murnau
  • Nagisa Oshima
  • Satyajit Ray
  • Jean Renoir
  • Eric Rohmer
  • Steven Spielberg
  • Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet
  • François Truffaut
  • Apichatpong Weerasethakul

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.