On the Meaning of Baseball (and a Suggestion)
When I am trying to recall my childhood, the best I often call forth is a phantasmagorical flash of images and feelings; for instance, a friend whose play habits I have forgotten or a name without a...
View ArticleThe Myth of Fairy Inferiority
If someone wrote a constitution outlining the powers allotted the contemporary storyteller, one of its central clauses might read like this: “So-called ‘myths,’ an antiquated genre cobbled together...
View ArticleThe Saturnine Age and the Modern Genius
When a modern person thinks of artistic genius, they imagine an individual. Some have quantified genius by standardized exams – for example, the I.Q. test – but most know a genius by his work. The...
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Bearing New Images
Hayao Miyazaki’s films are some of the most charming in the short history of cinema. The heroes of his animated tales—Pazu in Castle in the Sky, Ashitaka in Princess Mononoke, and Princess Nausicaä in...
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The Purest of Lines: Isao Takahata’s Final Bow
In November 2013, after fourteen years between films and at age 78, the brilliant animated feature film director Isao Takahata released Kaguya-hime no Monogatari in his native Japan. Under the title...
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Seven Minutes that Shook the World
“Of all the arts…cinema is the most important.” ~ V. I. Lenin We are told that they are the seven most important minutes in film, and at the time of this writing they are ninety years old. These...
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Kuleshov’s Effect: The Man behind Soviet Montage
It was in 1918 that Lev Kuleshov—film theorist, father of the Soviet Montage school of cinema, director of The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924), political...
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