Daniel Witkin
By Daniel Witkin
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Culture An Exile In Marseilles But Out Of Time
We learn very little about Georg, the hero of Christian Petzold’s new film, “Transit.” In exile from Germany, he arrives in Marseilles with few possessions of his own, very little time, and the documents of a writer whose death in Paris was covered up. It is out of desperation, we can ascertain, that he begins…
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Culture Steve Bannon Gets The Best Of Errol Morris
Of all the indicators of exactly how fast public life moves in the twenty-first century, few are more perplexing or disturbing than the fact that it’s now possible for liberals to experience nostalgia for Steve Bannon. No matter how much one has tried to keep up with this acceleration, the ever-increasing pace at which the…
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Culture This Was The End Of Francois Truffaut’s Innocence
Even if he hadn’t started his career with “The 400 Blows,” one of cinema’s defining studies of childhood, Francois Truffaut would have a reputation as a particularly youthful filmmaker. His style is marked by its verve, as summed up by the director’s maxim, “four ideas for every one minute,” and the particular livewire energy of…
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Film & TV A Love Letter To Max Blecher, Scars And All
Pott’s disease is a form of tuberculosis that bypasses the lungs and takes up residency in the bones, particularly the vertebrae. It is this macabre ailment that afflicts Emmanuel, the protagonist of Romanian director Radu Jude’s new film “Scarred Hearts,” playing at Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archives starting July 27. By the time the movie begins,…
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Film & TV Who Was That Masked Man In ‘Eyes Wide Shut?’
One of the most iconic moments from Leon Vitali’s career in movies – which began in acting and evolved to encompass an expansive range of activities working as what might with a good degree of understatement be described as an “assistant” for legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick — came as he was masked and anonymous. During…
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Film & TV For Olivier Assayas, The Past Is Always Present
Olivier Assayas’s 1994 film “Cold Water” was a coming of age film in more ways than one. A teen romance set in the heady aftermath of Paris’s May ’68 uprising, the film showcases adolescent angst, romance, and the friction that accompanies the first encounters with something larger than oneself. For Assayas, it also represents, “The…
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Film & TV The Nazi-Era Thriller That Got Its Director Banned From Filmmaking
Among its various achievements, the 1943 thriller “Le Corbeau” (or “The Raven”) earned its director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, a lifetime ban from filmmaking. Clouzot had made his caustic movie during the height of the Nazi occupation of France for a German-controlled production company called Continental Films, which had been created by Joseph Goebbels to pacify French…
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Film & TV From Argentina, Insane Music, Unexpected Harmonies and Marxist Overtones
The opening of Alejo Moguillansky’s new film, “The Little Match Girl,” does the audience the unusual courtesy of setting forth a catalog of the attractions to come. “There is an orchestra playing some insane music. There is a donkey. There is a little girl named Cleo,” a narrator intones. “There are a lot of pianos….
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