Magazine Monday: Film Comment

by Steven D. Mathews, Library Assistant

The Yocum Library subscribes to the print edition of Film Comment, a bimonthly magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City. 

For more than fifty years, Film Comment has reviewed and discussed the world of current cinema and its history. The January/February 2017 issue features an article on the works of Martin Scorsese and his new film Silence (2016)

The most recent issue (March/April 2017) features an article on Albert Serra’s The Death of King Louis XIV (2016). The cover of the issue shows the 76-year-old Sun King, the nickname for King Louis XIV of France (1638–1715), in a huge wig and ostentatious eighteenth-century clothes, lying on his back, presumably on his deathbed. 

Yonca Talu’s article on the film describes Serra’s lack of romanticism for the Sun King’s death: “The King’s physical deterioration is rendered through an unnervingly static and hypnotically paced mise en scène that, while viscerally involving the audience in Louis’s suffering, does not induce identification: the film’s true protagonist is not Louis XIV, but rather death, treated as a simultaneously cruel and banal fact of life” (26). The film reminds us no one can escape mortality, even the so-called divine ruler who built the Palace of Versailles.

Another article, “Text and Image” by Max Nelson, provides striking examples from the silent-movie era to the present of how on-screen texts, either as diegetic (from the world of the film) or non-diegetic (placed intentionally by the filmmakers), can impact the cinematic experience. 

“On-screen words can lodge in a film’s world, hover over it (in superimpositions), or interject themselves around it (in intertitles). Visually, they can announce themselves at the front of the frame, peek out from its corners, slither through it elusively, lurk in its background, or—as often happens with superimposed text—emerge as its single most striking element” (48). The article reviews a new book on the subject, Words on Screen, by the French theorist, Michel Chion.

Besides reviews and articles of cinema, books on cinema, home media, and streaming services, Film Comment also has web-only content on their web site, which includes reviews of Turner Classic Movie programming, recent film festivals, and a podcast.