A new video essay for 20th Century Flicks, on Wild Strawberries (1957) and the relationship between Ingmar Bergman and Victor Sjöström.

A new video essay, this time on the work of Robert Altman for our April screening of Nashville (1975) at The Cube.

As you may or may not know, I have for the best part of four years been introducing films at The Cube cinema for one of their repertory slots called 20th Century Cube, a monthly night programmed in conjunction with Bristol’s legendary (yes) 20th Century Flicks video shop. Last May, as I was unable to make it to that month’s screening in person, we decided to embrace the miracle that is modern technology and compile a short narrated video introduction instead, thereby entering us into the burgeoning and somewhat uncharted creative sphere of video essay making. The experiment seemed to be a success – the visual aspect unsurprisingly proving a more enriching experience than that of that guy again standing up and delivering a monologue – and since then I have been assembling videos for almost all of our screenings.

By way of an apology for not having posted on here for a while then, I offer the fruits of my recent labours as some form of recompense, nearly all of which are now collected over at my YouTube channel. The early ones, predictably enough, are a bit rough and ready, but my more recent ones are getting a little more sophisticated as I find myself increasingly comfortable in navigating my way around the editing software. Anyway, here’s the ones which i’m most happy with: Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Michael Mann’s Thief (1981) and Suzuki Seijun’s Branded to Kill (1967). More to follow, as and when they arrive…