Notes and scribblings

Tuesday, 31 March 2026

March 2026

Best First Viewings:

Night at the Crossroads (Jean Renoir, 1932)

La Chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931)

Kobayashi Issa (Fumio Kamei, 1941)

Easter in Sicily (Vittorio De Seta, 1955)

Blood on Wolf Mountain (Fei Mu, 1936)

Hélas Pour Moi (Jean-Luc Godard, 1993)

Lonesome Dove (Simon Wincer, 1989)

Barabbas (Richard Fleischer, 1961)

The Necklace (Claude Chabrol, 2007)

Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963)

Louis Lumière (Éric Rohmer, 1968)

Day of the Badman (Harry Keller, 1958)

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (Bertrand Blier, 1978)

They Would Elope (D.W. Griffith, 1909)

Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance (Tony Scull, 1976)

The Birth, The Life and the Death of Christ (Alice Guy-Blaché, 1906)

Solomon and Sheba (King Vidor, 1959)

Books Read:

Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon

Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott

The Sea and Poison by Shūsaku Endō

Letters of James Agee to Father Flye by James Agee, James Harold Flye

The Golem by Gustav Meyrink

Roman Polanski: A Life in Exile by Julia Ain-Krupa

World Book Day: 5th March

World Poetry Day: 21st March

Saturday, 28 February 2026

February 2026

Best First Viewings:

The Time to Live and the Time to Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1985)

Washerwomen on the River (Auguste Lumière, Louis Lumière, 1897)

The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat, 2010)

Nymphlight (Joseph Cornell, 1957)

Sea Countrymen (Vittorio De Seta, 1955)

Message of Greetings: Prix suisse / My Thanks / Dead or Alive / Message de salutations: Prix suisse / remerciements / mort ou vif (Jean-Luc Godard, 2015)

Sentimental Romance (Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Aleksandrov, 1930)

Vibration of Granada/Vibración de Granada (José Val del Omar, 1935)

Books Read:

John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity by Garry Wills

Wraiths of the Broken Land by S. Craig Zahler

Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov by Robert Golla (Editor), Vladimir Nabokov

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Saturday, 31 January 2026

January 2026

Best First Viewings:

Congregation Leaving St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, Dublin (1901)

David and Bathsheba (Henry King, 1951)

I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice (Gabriel Lizama (AKA Liz Taylor), 2026)

Joe Dakota (Richard Bartlett, 1957)

Kill Me Again (John Dahl, 1989)

Midwinter Sacrifice/Midvinterblot (Gösta Werner, 1946)

The Music of Nilsson (1971)

Over Silent Paths (D.W. Griffith, 1910)

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)

Where to Land (Hal Hartley, 2025)

Books Read:

Bank Shot by Donald E. Westlake

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick by John Bleasdale

Detour (BFI Film Classics) by Noah Isenberg

Blues of a Lifetime: The Autobiography of Cornell Woolrich by Cornell Woolrich/Mark T. Bassett (editor)

Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars by Ray Bradbury

Untypical: How the World Isn’t Built for Autistic People and What We Should All Do About it by Pete Wharmby

Quotes

“MOVIES RESURRECT THE BEAUTIFUL DEAD…” - SUSAN SONTAG/"Shadows by the film folk, masses by the good people." - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake/“The task I'm trying to achieve, above all, is to make you see.” - D. W. Griffith/“The cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.” - Alexandre Astruc/"GOOD CINEMA IS WHAT WE CAN BELIEVE AND BAD CINEMA IS WHAT WE CAN'T BELIEVE." - ABBAS KIAROSTAMI/“FILM LOVERS ARE SICK PEOPLE” – FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT/"CINEMA IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FRAUD IN THE WORLD.” – JEAN-LUC GODARD/“FILM SHOULD BE LOOKED AT STRAIGHT ON, IT IS NOT THE ART OF SCHOLARS BUT OF ILLITERATES.” – WERNER HERZOG/“FILM AS DREAM, FILM AS MUSIC. NO ART PASSES OUR CONSCIENCE IN THE WAY FILM DOES, AND GOES DIRECTLY TO OUR FEELINGS, DEEP DOWN INTO THE DARK ROOMS OF OUR SOULS.”- INGMAR BERGMAN/"Cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream." - Federico Fellini/"RELATING A PERSON TO THE WHOLE WORLD: THAT IS THE MEANING OF CINEMA." - ANDREI TARKOVSKY./"Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper." - Jean Cocteau/"THE CINEMA IS AN INVENTION WITHOUT ANY FUTURE" - AUGUSTE AND LOUIS LUMIÈRE/"FILM AS AN ART IS FINISHED. IT’S DEAD. . . . LET’S JUST READ. IN SUCH A ROTTEN WORLD, ONLY BOOKS WILL SAVE US. ONLY BOOKS." - OKI’S MOVIE (2010)/"THERE IS NO CRISIS IN CINEMA. THERE ARE NEGATIVE PERIODS. THERE ARE TIMES WHEN SOME FILMS ARE RECEIVED WELL AND OTHERS AREN'T. THE PAST TEACHES US THAT SOME FILMS WERE RECEIVED BADLY, WHILE OTHERS GO SAILING ON." - VITTORIO DE SICA/"FOR ME, THE CINEMA IS NOT A SLICE OF LIFE, BUT A PIECE OF CAKE." - ALFRED HITCHCOCK/“CINEMA IS FREUD PLUS LUMIÈRE.” - PHILIPPE GARREL/“Art has nothing to do with morality, convention, or moralizing.” - Patricia Highsmith/"Films can illustrate our existence... they can distress, disturb and provoke people into thinking about themselves and certain problems. But NOT give the answers." - Joseph Losey/“A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence. Fadeout. It's all over in less than 70 minutes.” - Jacques Tourneur/"Cinematographic action should not contend itself with the personal, but stretch beyond the human to the domain of nature and dream." - Germaine Dulac/“CINEMA CONTAINS EVERYTHING. IT JOINS WRITING, PAINTING, MUSIC. IT IS THE MOST COMPLETE ART.” - Juliet Berto, Ciné-Bulles, 1986/"I estimate the final disappearance of cinemas as taking place around the year 2020, so in fifty years time there will be nothing but television." -Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970/“I hope I wasn’t too pessimistic. But film is really a fragile art.” - Lotte Eisner