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We will only see each other occasionally, he says, but each time will be like our first time — a celebration. She listens to him attentively and nods. I can only be a luxury for you, because I am a married man. I know, she says. Perhaps that won’t be enough for you, he says. I understand that. She …

At first I used to resist my mind's wandering during such films, thinking I was wasting the price of admission. But just as in Buddhist meditation one is instructed not to brush aside the petty or silly thoughts that rise up, since those "distractions" are precisely the material of the meditation, …

[...] a Bresson composition draws inward, implodes, abstractly denies truck with daily life, cuts off all exist. In many scenes of Diary, the priest, let into a parishioner's house, encounters almost immediately a painful interview in which his own values are attacked, ridiculed, tempted. There is …

There was a solitary chapel scene, ending in one of those strange short dolly shots that Bresson was so fond of, a movement of almost clumsy longing toward the priest at the altar, as though the camera itself were taking communion. Suddenly I had the impression that the film had stopped, or, rather…

Antonioni's interest in local mores and the material divisions of the social world was obviously still strong when he made this first feature. Later it would evaporate in the face of a jet-set rootlessness: the filmmaker would take up comfortable international residence in what Georg Lukacs called …