Word: rosselini
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...another level, editing and use of subjective techniques, from point-of-view shots to the optical changes defined by the variations in different lenses, defeat any attempt at total simulation of reality--even in the best work of the best documentary film-makers, and those early works of Rosselini and Visconti which attempted to subordinate stylization to realism...
...Mail. Although Air Mail is legally owned either by Universal, or Ford and his producer, it has slipped into one of the hundreds of excellent underground collections of films throughout the country: collections which possess all of Chaplin's features, and such classics as Murnau's Tabu, Rosselini's Paisan, complete versions of Fritz Lang's first Doctor Mabuse, and early films by Jean Renoir, to name some of the most popular items in the underground market...
Algiers is in the great tradition of the first neo-realist masterpieces, Rosselini's Open City and Visconti's La Terra Trema. But where those two films dealt entirely with killing and oppression of the weak by Fascists and reactionary capitalists, the killing of innocent people in Algiers is committed mostly by the NLF, Pontecorvo's heroes. In accepting the slaughter of hundreds of citizens, guilty only in their complacent acceptance of a derelict social structure, Pontecorvo emphasizes the validity of necessary social upheaval, regardless of its price. Each death becomes not a crime of the NLF but the tragic...
...problem goes deeper than Nichols' consistent substitution of trickiness for style. A great director, Rosselini or Hitchcock, plans his film as a totality, understanding instinctively how each shot relates to the film as a whole; a competent director of narrative films like Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) plans shots with relation to the entire scene. Nichols, however, cannot plan past a given shot, and although a frame may contain an effective gimmick, camera angle, or background detail, the scenes themselves are purposeless and disconnected, largely due to awkward and self-conscious editing...
...conflicting spatial relationships from the many people in his best-seller-based sagas, and his films work on a level far transcending the dramatic material. From this specialized, perhaps perverse, point-of-view, Hurry Sundown is close to Preminger's best film.