Watching a Frank Capra film is a bit like drinking a light beer. It is not an unpleasant experience and it can be rather refreshing but it clearly does not have the finesse, subtlety and richness of the real thing.
So if you feel like sipping on patriotic, feel-good, we-are-all-wonderful-people-if-we-pull-together type messaging, Meet John Doe should about do it. Barbara Stanwyck pulls a fairly entertaining performance and Gary Cooper, who was nominated for an Oscar for this film (????) and ended up winning the Oscar that same year for Sergeant York, does what Gary Cooper usually does: be his stoic self and let his good looks and imposing stature do the rest.
Not for the cynics.

For anyone other than Ayn Rand herself, the idea of bringing her tedious and radical 1943 novel to the screen would have seemed a gargantuan and impossible task.

Rand’s novel about the powers of egoism and reason as the ultimate tools of human happiness is a laborious and fascinating read that packs enough philosophical verbosity to make any screenwriter cringe. How does one effectively condense 700 pages of philosophical discourse into a less than 2 hours film and still manages to keep the cinema audience entertained? How do you lead your actors to act like the ultimate reasoning and rational egoists (and therefore, by all traditional standards, with a high degree of coldness) without resorting to dull and expressionless simulating (Brad Pitt attempting to play a blasé vampire for instance)?
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Film architecture and design has existed almost as long as cinema itself. In 1976, Leon Barsacq argued in Caligari’s Cabinet And Other Grand Illusions that the fantasist sets developed by Georges Melies at the beginning of the 20th century were a considerable improvement over anything that had been done previously in that they created a deeper reality and gave the image a more substantial meaning. He further added that cinema escaped its primitive phase once it moved away from simple backdrops to three-dimensional sets, thereby creating an architectural space within cinema[1]. Post World War I, the German Expressionists fully explored this new architectural space through the creation of sets that attempted to reflect the inner emotions of the characters in the films. And David O. Selznik’s use of the term ‘production design’ in reference to the work of the American director and set designer William Cameron Menzies on Gone with the Wind (1939), finally helped film design and architecture gain the official recognition and visibility that has since become an integral part of the cinematic experience and of the output of most film industries.

Following fairly closely the emergence of production values in the history of cinema has been the rise and acceptance of science fiction cinema. It is indisputable that the two are interconnected and that a process exists where both feed off from one another. Cinema learns from architecture and architecture learns from cinema. As far back as 1926, many architects were said to have been impressed and influenced by Metropolis (1926). Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) also apparently became a source of inspiration for the world of architecture, with the director himself having sourced a lot of his inspiration from several existing architectural and design trends and concepts. Today, terms like ‘science fiction architecture’, ‘high-tech architecture’ or ‘cyber architecture’ are commonly used to refer to a new and ‘modern’ style of architecture that draws heavily on science fiction and new technologies. For many architects, ‘science fiction is an imaginative form of design’[2], making its visualizations worth studying.

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With its ravishing black and white cinematography, this early and uncredited adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice is sexy and gritty and offers a fascinating look at Italy in the 40’s….

‘Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the results of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them’
Hume
At the core of most paradoxes lie unresolved contradictions. Douglas Sirk was a man in search of ambiguity, most likely due to his own ‘split’ character, even though he never said so in so many words. But it is difficult to imagine a straight and undivided personality seeking, time after time, to populate his work with tormented and ambiguous characters. Even less likely is the idea of a happy and content artist constantly creating situations in which his characters find themselves trapped, constrained, and with nowhere to go except back to the beginning. This inability to confront and to deal with one’s own predicament, or worse, to slowly become aware of it only to attempt a mediocre and inappropriate escape, results in the failure of a human being to transcend his or her space and to ascend to betterment. Whether this interest in failure and the ambiguity that lies in many people originated in Sirk’s experiences in Nazi Germany or from some more innate predisposition (probably a combination of both), it nevertheless instilled in him a cynicism and love of irony, which, combined with a masterly craftsmanship for mise-en-scene and for working with actors, resulted in some very powerful works that could operate on different levels.
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Sorry but i don’t get it. I am not going to make many friends in the film connoisseurs community by saying this, but the usual dose of exaggerations and over-the-top and unrealistic situations that come with many Powell/Pressburger films leave me cold, and, often, with a migraine as well.

To attempt to define the exact meaning of realism would be a useless excercise, one that would be most likely bound to fail. Countless critics and historians have offered their own interpretations over the years, providing valuable insights into the subject, but succeeding only in offering partial explanations of the concept. Through this ‘extreme relativity of the concept of realism’[1], any effort to develop a universal definition of realism becomes trivial and secondary to the more interesting study of the various branches that a desire for capturing reality can engender in art and, specifically here, in cinema.
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British Science Fiction cinema has always lived in the shadow of its American counterpart, either as a result of a direct effort to emulate an American style to enable the films to reach broader markets or as an indirect consequence of the fact that, since the 50’s, Science Fiction cinema has been associated with America, drawing on its rich heritage of comics and magazines.

But British Science Fiction cinema has in fact a much greater legacy than is often given credit to. Since the beginning of the 20th century, various British directors and producers have explored the genre, often taking it into new directions, pushing its boundaries, and drawing on the wealth of ideas and masterful works which British Science Fiction writers like H.G Wells, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham and Michael Moorcock have produced over the years.

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The transition from silent to sound proved quite a challenging one for French cinema. Considering that Leon Gaumont started to experiment with sound at the turn of the century, it is rather unfortunate that by the 1920s, practically all attempts to bring sound to film had ended in France. And by 1926, when Warner’s Don Juan came out in America, most French production companies still did not have the foresight to understand the full implications of Fox’ Movietone or Western Electric’s Vitaphone.

But foresight was not the only thing lacking within the French film industry throughout the 1920s. Indeed, several factors contributed to a slow transition to sound and to a passiveness that would result in ‘silent movies persisting well into the 1930s, and even towards the end of 1931 it has been estimated that less than a quarter of France’s 4500 cinemas had been converted to sound’.[1]

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To understand the Japanese film industry’s reaction to the coming of sound, it is necessary to look at it in the context of the country’s relationship to performance arts and particularly, to the art of Katsuben. While Japan’s official transition to sound did not come until the year 1935 (and even at that time, silent films continued to play a prominent role), some have argued that sound had in fact existed in Japanese films and foreign films distributed in Japan since the turn of the century.

This argument is not a new one and has also been made for silent films in general, since actors and actresses had always “spoken” in films before the coming of sound. However, in the case of Japan, the argument takes on a new dimension as illustrated by the art of the Katsuben. As we will see, many factors delayed the arrival of sound in Japan, but there is little doubt that the Katsuben, and the influence they exercised throughout the first thirty years of the industry, was the strongest of these factors.

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Did the world ever design anything more beautiful than what was created in the US between 1930 and 1955? I tend to think not, at least not as part of a well-defined style as was the case with the Streamline Style of that period. The Streamline Style stood for mobility, speed, efficiency, luxury and hygiene, concepts that were all identified with modernity. It was also the symbol of mass consumption, which Americans were ready to embrace at the beginning of the 30s and after World War II. Once again, what fascinates me here is this embrace of a dream, this thirst to create the perfect city of the future, this belief that all will be well and that the times ahead will only bring prosperity and happiness. In addition, of course, to a design philosophy which appeals completely to my sense of aesthetics. People like Bell Geddes, Teague, Mendelsohn, Dreyfuss and Loewy tried to create a society where form and function would merge to create the most inspiring experiences.