Gilberto Perez

“Godard and Miéville put together Ici et ailleurs (1976) out of pieces from Jusqu’à la victoire, a militant film about the Palestinian situation . . . it conveys on Godard’s part an unearned sense of being let down by the Palestinians on screen; like his revolutionism, his disillusionment with revolution has something brattish about it. When MacCabe later ‘asked him what he thought of politics’, Godard ‘mimed injecting a huge syringe into his arm’ and replied ‘Some people take drugs, some people take politics.’”

Aphotograph of Abbas Kiarostami in Hamid Dabashi’s book shows him crouching over a frying pan that has two eggs in it. Beside him, and like him focused on the eggs, is the original movie camera invented by Lumière. The photograph was taken during the shooting of Lumière et compagnie, a film which, on the 100th anniversary of Lumière’s invention, enlisted...

‘I’m really against nudity in movies,’ Julia Roberts said a while ago. ‘When you act with your clothes on, it’s a performance. When you act with your clothes off, it’s a documentary. I don’t do documentaries.’ Quoting this bit of wit and wisdom in a recent New Yorker piece on Roberts, Anthony Lane wrote: ‘it shows … how remote she...

‘He is the best novelist of the films,’ Erwin Piscator said of Erich von Stroheim, whose Wedding March (1928) he likened to a novel by Balzac. That was the last film Stroheim completed as a director. He may be better known as an actor (‘the man you love to hate’, La Grande Illusion, Sunset Boulevard), but in the history of film he made more of a mark as a director. It...