I have a new article out today on Elio Petri’s The Tenth Victim in Senses of Cinema.
As I write, “in the early to mid 1960s, the Italian cinema was going through a sort of renaissance, as it not only produced important films by such renowned cineastes as Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini and many others, but also works by more ‘populist’ filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Mario Bava. Elio Petri was a director who straddled both worlds. An avowed leftist, Petri nevertheless pursued commercial projects when he felt that they could also make a social statement within the content of supposedly escapist entertainment.
Having begun his apprenticeship in the cinema working as an assistant to director Giuseppe De Santis on several projects, most notably the neorealist drama Roma ore 11 (Rome 11 O’Clock, 1952), Petri then directed a number of shorts before helming his first feature, L’assassino (The Lady Killer of Rome, 1961), which starred Marcello Mastroianni in a straight dramatic role as an antique dealer unjustly accused of murder.
L’assassino was a critical and commercial success, and Petri continued on with several other projects, including one segment of the omnibus film Alta infedeltà (High Infidelity, 1964) entitled “Peccato nel pomeriggio”, before getting his first shot at a major international production with the film considered here, La decima vittima (The Tenth Victim, 1965). Petri got the idea for the film from a 1953 short story by science fiction author Robert Sheckley entitled “The Seventh Victim”. When La decima vittima opened and became an international hit, Sheckley wrote a “novelisation” of the film under the title The Tenth Victim, in 1966. It was Petri, however, who wrote the script for the film itself.”
You can read the entire article by clicking here, or on the image above.
Frame by Frame Video: Film Journals
Wednesday, November 28th, 2012Here’s a new video I just finished, directed by Curt Bright, on film journals and magazines.
As I note in this brief video, there are really three types of film journals: fanzines, which are designed for the general public; trade journals, which keep abreast of developments within the industry; and more scholarly journals, which seriously examine film as an art form. This brief list of cinema journals isn’t by any means exhaustive; for example, Film International has recently emerged as one of the most important scholarly film journals available on the web, and also publishes a print edition; and Hollywood Wiretap has recently changed its name to Studio System News, offering inside industry information on a daily basis, also free; all you have to do is sign up for a subscription.
There’s also Cinema Journal, one of the most important of all scholarly film journals, published by The Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and numerous other journals that could also have been mentioned in this video.There are many, many other journals to choose from. What I really wanted to do here was not to be a completist — otherwise the video would be thirty minutes long – but rather to give the viewer some idea of the general outlines of what’s available in film journalism beyond the “daily reviews” and blogs that proliferate on the web and in print, which offer more detailed analysis that daily reviewers can possibly offer.
In any event, check out the video for yourself, and also the journals it mentions, as well as other publications in the field, available either online, or at your local library; they’ll give you a much better picture of film as a business, and an art form.
Click on the image above to see the video.
Tags: Cinema Journal, Film Comment, Film Criticism, Film Culture, Film International, Film Magazines, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Screening the Past, Senses of Cinema, Studio System News
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