The Tree of Wooden Clogs

This dark comedy from Joel & Ethan Coen is a distillation of some of the duo’s most potent themes. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is our Job figure, a physics professor in suburban Minneapolis who finds his life falling apart both personally and professionally. The principle of uncertainty, introduced early in the film via Schroedinger’s famous…

John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath opens with a view of the “scarred earth,” then lifts its eyes to consider the scarred people that lived on that earth.  It finds these people staggering through the Dust Bowl storms that struck the Southern U.S. in the 1930’s.  This early passage from the novel seems to lay bare the…

“There are moments when the social world seems more evident in an object or a gesture than in the whole concatenation of our beliefs and institutions.” In this quote, anthropologist David MacDougall encapsulates the ambition of observational cinema with perfect precision. “Through our senses we measure the qualities of our surroundings—the tempo of life, the…

In a key scene of Romanian writer–director Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, Gabita Dragut (Laura Vasiliu) and her college roommate and friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) agree never again to discuss the horrific events of that day. To draw a shroud of silence over certain overwhelming experiences is a natural impulse. We avert our eyes, like urban pedestrians…

My Life to Live (1961) opens with a series of closeups of Nana (Anna Karina)—her left profile, her face straight on, her right profile, and then, in the first dramatic scene of the film, a two-minute shot of the back of her head, as she breaks up with a boyfriend in a busy Parisian cafe. The…