Cameraperson

We must decide to be human. In the People’s Square, before a great crowd of witnesses and in representing them, we must make the decision to be wholly human. Wim Wenders’ wonderful and dreamlike 1987 fantasy, Der Himmel über Berlin, portrays two angels observing the people of a divided Berlin.   As the camera floats freely…

Victoire Thivisol was four years old when she played Ponette, a girl struggling to understand her mother’s death in a car accident. The range and depth of emotion she displays makes me a little worried about what director Jacques Doillon did to coax the performance out of her. Thivisol became the youngest actress to win…

This classic, brilliantly colorful film from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger follows five nuns, led by Sister Clodagh, into the Himalayas to start a hospital and school for the local villagers. The battle against the elements and the local culture proves to be a formidable one, though Sister Clodagh’s most difficult tasks comes from within—through…

In his 14th full-length film, I Am Not Your Negro, Haitian-born director Raoul Peck achieved perfection with a masterful blending of a screenplay by writer and activist James Baldwin, footage old and new, and an eclectic soundtrack that underscores his film’s ideas and contentions.  As a cinematic essay, it is an intellectual and emotional argument so persuasive, it…

John Ford’s 1956 Western, The Searchers, ends with the camera framing a doorway, looking out into the gloriously filmed desert. As his remaining friends and family cross over the threshold into the welcoming house, John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards stays outside, watching them. Then he pauses a moment, turns, and walks off into the red dust. There’s…