Week 22/2025

This week’s selection balances things out between lavish mise-en-scène, montage and cinematographic experiment. In the 1920s, soviet director Lev Kuleshov was trying to assert cinematography’s legitimacy as an art form, looking for the forms that might “produce an artistic impression”. He would find that a film’s form and ideas take shape in montage and his early experiments were partly responses to American editing rhythms. In By the Law, he recasts a Jack Chambers Hollywood-style frontier tale as stark chamber drama, stripped of adventure and judged in close quarters. An austere anti-melodrama with all the emotional stakes but none of the sentimental payoff. Accompanied live by musicians Matis Cooreman and Seppe Gebruers.

Even Kuleshov would find it safe to say that Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris both produces artistic impressions and pushes cinema as an art form. We’re in a simulacrum of Paris, seduced by lavish shots, colour and music, not montage and confrontation. Dreams not dialectics. Whereas Kuleshov sought a truly cinematic expression, Minnelli used tricks of all trades in this painterly choreography, this sentimental – though just right – portrayal of an aspiring painter.

These forms all hit the “skin” of our eyes equally well. Again Kuleshov: “In the past, a man viewed everything from eye level, from a moving horse, at best from atop a hill. Now, he can observe and perceive from everywhere, and what is more, with variations of speed.” The cinematic essay Skin of Our Eye (1973) by Arthur & Corinne Cantrill captures the Melbourne counter-culture scene through an exploration of “the relationship of projector, screen, camera, the film strip of the positive or negative, the coloured gelatin, the film frame, the projector gate, the projector lens, the projected image of the screen and the blackness around... colour and lack of colour, black-and-white, negative and positive, over and underexposure.”