Thinking Aloud About Film: Ritrovato Round-Up 2025 with Pamela Hutchinson
https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/07/02/thinking-aloud-about-film-ritrovato-round-up-2025-with-pamela-hutchinson/
For this year’s Ritrovato Round-Up we are joined by the witty, incisive and all-around fabulous Pamela Hutchinson, editor of the Silent London website, author of two marvellous BFI Classic monographs (The Red Shoes, Pandora's Box), producer of the Weekly Film Bulletin for Sight and Sound and one of the jurors for Ritrovato's DVD Awards since 2018.
In the discussion that follows we touch on all the strands of the festival, praise Cecilia Cenciarelli for her programming, Mariann Lewinsky for her illuminating introductions and Ehsan Khoshbakht for his superb programme notes on Lewis Milestone. We touch on the Willi Forst and Nordic Noir programmes, so popular José couldn't get into any of them. We have a lively debate on Molly Haskell's Hepburn programme, agree on our love of Naruse, discuss how Comencini's Delitto de amore highlights issues of class and made us want to see more Comencini films and delight in the early cinema and silent cinema strands. Sumitra Peries' Gehenu Lamai (The Girls) is a film we all adored. We touch on memorable experiences, such as watching Coline Serrault introduce Trois hommes et un couffin at the Piazza Maggiore, or the incredible response to Chaplin's The Gold Rush, the impact of Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice, the intensity of the colour in Duel in the Sun, or the spontaneous applause for Shirley MacLaine in Artists and Models.
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Thinking Aloud About Film: (Arrebato, Iván Zulueta, 1979)
https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/06/12/thinking-aloud-about-film-arrebato-ivan-zulueta-1979/
A cult film; a queer film; a vampire film; a film maudit; a film about film; a film about drugs; a film about film as a drug; a film that deserves to be better known. Audiences will recognise many of Almodóvar’s collaborators from his earliest works (Cecilia Roth, Eusebio Poncela, Luis Ciges, Will More; Ángel Luis Fernádez is the dop) and the voice of Almódovar himself. A genre film that transforms into an auteur film. A film of the Movida and a film of the transition. A film that embodies and evokes one era but that gained traction in another. A cinephile’s film about addiction where one delights in being bitten by drugs and cinema even as that bite becomes transformative and potentially deadly. An avant-garde experiment encased in a genre film. A trawl through the underground that aimed at the mainstream. A film to see and discuss.
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JAMES TAYLOR on THE SUPERHERO BLOCKBUSTER: ADAPTATION, STYLE AND MEANING
https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/06/06/jose-arroyo-in-conversation-with-james-taylor-on-the-superhero-blockbuster-adaptation-style-and-meaning/
Just as the Superhero film loses centrality in the culture there comes a book that is not only a brilliant accounting of the various strategies of adaptations the mode engages with but also offers a methodology that will be of interest and use to anyone engaged with the analysis of visual media: not only a brilliant book, but an important one. In this podcast we talk about what it is that is being adapted when discussing comic book characters that have so many iterations across different media. We talk about modes of seriality; the translation of the illusion of movement across media; the significance of bodies in spaces and movement in the mode; intertextuality, kaleidoscopic irruptions; how the move to digital affected issues of realism and reflexivity; restorative and reflective nostalgia; how the works compress, hierarchize and create continuities; the dramatization of alternate timelines….and we return over and over again to the hierarchization of gendered, racialised and sexualised bodies in dialogue with past iterations, current politics, contemporary formal strategies and more. I can't imagine future explorations of audiovisual work engaged with adapting any form of Intellectual Property, characters or worlds uninformed by THE SUPERHERO BLOCKBUSTER: ADAPTATION, STYLE AND MEANING.
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Thinking Aloud About Film: Le Jour se lève (Marcel Carné, 1939)
https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/05/30/thinking-aloud-about-film-le-jour-se-leve-marcel-carne-1939/
We discuss Marcel Carné's superb Daybreak/ Le Jour se lève, which we saw at the Garden Cinema as part of their wonderful Film Noir International programme.
In the podcast we discuss the film as an example of ‘Poetic Realism’; as one of the first films to be described as a ‘film noir’; as an expression of the Popular Front sentiment and how the film’s reception aligned with reviewers’ political views. In relation to the film, we discuss the significance of its structure, the precision of the decor and mise-se-en-scène where it seems every object in François room subsequently comes into play to describe loss, longing, love, innocence since tarnished. I have made a compilation of all the times Gabin looks out the bullet-riddled window and outside. As the day rises and the night ends so does François’ life. We discuss Gabin, Arletty, Jules Berry…all at their best. Gabin is the representative everyman with nothing to live for but more sand in his lungs. It’s not only that as Georges Altman writes, ‘the whole of the working class is etched in Gabin’s face’ it’s that Gabin’s IS the face of the whole of the French working classes. He is François,. She is Françoise. Together they represent the oppression of the French working class. They are everyman and everywoman, orphaned by capitalism. This is a film not only about doomed love but a protest against class-as-destiny, one of the film’s most worked-through themes.
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Thinking Aloud About Film: One Second (Zhang Yimou, 2020)
https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/05/25/one-second-zhang-yimou-2020/
Zhang Yimou’s very beautiful film has things to say about the cultural revolution and Chinese History and other things we’re not best placed to discuss. However, it is also about cinema: it’s lure, it’s power, its enchantments and its fragility; and Zhang Yimou’s magisterial mise-en-scène embodies its themes through its medium as if in the process of unfurling from an editing sweet, to a projector and onto a screen.
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