ArSENik | PassionforCinema

Filmmaker, Graduate Student (MFA in Filmmaking)

ArSENik's Blog

9
Delicatessen – How to Tell a Story through Sound
Note: This post contains some spoilers! It’s been years now since cinephiles have been fighting over the endless debate as to whether the visuals are more important than the sounds in a film. I was one of those who favored the visuals and argued my case by merely citing the existence of silent films. I had watched films with great sound design like Apocalypse Now,...
by ArSENik at November 12th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
10
The Cutting of ‘The 400 Blows’
Note: This post contains spoilers! François Truffaut’s first feature ‘The 400 Blows’ is not an editorial gold mine like that of his friend and colleague Jean-Luc Godard, whose debut film ‘Breathless’, made a year later in 1960, is sprinkled with jump cuts, heralding in a new style of cutting. However, ‘The 400 Blows’ does have...
by ArSENik at November 4th, 2009 at 07:11 am
9
A Cinematic Exploration of the Evolution of Film Noir – Se7en
Film noir has been around for a long time now, with its very dark roots in German Expressionism, since the Black and White days of cinematic infancy. As Darwin said, every life form must evolve. I believe this postulate can be extended to film genres as well. So, how has film noir evolved? The answer lies in watching Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt pursue a serial killer,...
by ArSENik at October 30th, 2009 at 07:10 am
1
In A Lonely Place – ‘hedunit?’
Personally, I find ‘whodunits’ uninteresting by and large. Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place” starring the great suave Humphrey Bogart is technically a whodunit, but on a lot of levels, it isn’t. It’s more – it is what you would term a ‘hedunit?’ and one of the better thrillers I have seen. Of course, trivially shoving it...
by ArSENik at October 21st, 2009 at 11:10 pm
4
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – We the People
Abraham Lincoln had once prescribed a government for this nation as one, of the people, by the people and for the people. Frank Capra seems to center this idea as the focal point of his 1939 political film ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’. Apart from using the Lincoln Memorial twice in the narrative – the first time as a set-up in the guise of a structure of...
by ArSENik at October 15th, 2009 at 09:10 pm
8
Ritwik Ghatak and Ajantrik
I was under the spotlight, and people generally behind the camera don’t really like the spotlight. Well OK, Hitchcock was an exception. The saleslady at the Music World in Calcutta’s College Street was breathing down my neck, asking me to “peek waan, saer” from a limited selection of ten or eleven Bangla DVD’s, so that we could pay, and release...
by ArSENik at September 3rd, 2009 at 12:09 pm