After so many films I think I can finally summarize just what it is that Rollin is doing in these movies that I find so enthralling - and it's that he's creating a cinema that's one of the purest distillations of a classical aesthetic of death and decay I know of. So many of the images he composes are drawn from a deep tradition, a kind of collective unconscious that he feeds on to inspire feelings of the sublime, to…
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The Incident 1967
Another of those films that brought to mind that J.G. Ballard quote about how his aim with his work was to "rub humanity's face in its own vomit and force it to look into the mirror", because The Incident sets out to show the very worst instincts of society all confined within the space of a NYC subway car at the end of the 1960s. Two young ne'er-do-wells, played by Tony Musante and Martin Sheen (in his first ever performance)…
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The Hustler 1961
A big classic I had yet to get to but am glad to have done now - The Hustler features Paul Newman in a a major early starring role, playing a man who lives for nothing but pool and to be a "winner" no matter the cost and no matter how little it actually means. He does a great job in making believable the development of this character as we see him fall to greater and greater depths before realising…
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The Piano Teacher 2001
Back in the days of the Old Hollywood there was a whole subgenre of the woman's picture that revolved around women essentially coded as spinsters/sexually repressed discovering themselves and their potential for romance, in Hays Code friendly ways of course - think Now, Voyager especially as the ur-example of this. At first this film hints that it might be a kind of modern take on the same material, and it is certainly a film about deepset sexual neurosis, but it…
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The Children's Hour 1961
Mary Tilford vs Veda Pierce deathmatch for the title of most loathable child in cinema
