Tag: wallpaper

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

The Hand
(Ruka)

Director – Jiří Trnka – 1965 – Czechoslovakia – Cert. PG – 18m

*****

A potter’s quiet life is interrupted by a giant hand which wants him to remake his pots in its image – on the Blu-ray Jiří Trnka: Puppet Master, released in the UK on Monday, August 10th

He sleeps peacefully on his simple bed in his room. We hear footsteps as we move around the room – is someone watching him? If so, he’s blissfully unaware of the fact. In the centre of the room is a potter’s wheel. On either side of the door are numerous pots. In the corner, a mirror; below it, a watering can on a little table. Moving towards his bed, we pass a window with a flower in a pot on the window’s interior sill.

He gets up, does some basic exercises, checks his tongue in the mirror, waters the plant on the window sill. Birds can be heard singing. The he gets down to the business of the day: making pots on his wheel. He is absorbed. But, an interruption. A knock at the door. Nothing there.

Eventually, a giant hand pushes its way through the shuttered window, the impact knocking the plant to the floor and shattering its pot.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Kim Novak’s Vertigo

Director – Alexandre O. Philippe – 2025 – UK – Cert. uncertificated – 76m

*****

An essential addition to the canon of work surrounding and helping audiences to understand the power of one of the cinema’s greatest works– out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 3rd

The opening black and white scene features actress Kim Novak, probably shot in the 1950s, as if through a peephole. This recalls Norman and his peephole in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). Novak here seems to know she is being watched, looks directly at the camera, then rolls her head so her eyes go into the darkness of shadow. Then, colour footage of present day, images that could be out of Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1945): a gate opening, a passage along a country roadway, a wooden memorial to someone. All this accompanied by the voice of Kim Novak, now in her twilight years, talking about her life on the soundtrack – her present difficulty in getting breath, how awful it must be to gasp for breath prior to dying.

All this has a Hitchcock connection. Novak is familiar to us from her twin roles in Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), the favourite film of director Philippe (and also, as it happens, of this critic) who specialises in documentaries about movies and made the definitive documentary about Psycho’s shower scene 78/52 (2017).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Pachyderm
(Pachyderme)

Director – Stéphanie Clément – 2022 – France – 11m

*****

A nine-year-old struggles with the trauma that befalls her at her grandpa’s – nominated for Best Animated Short at the 2024 Academy Awards, VoD details below review

She’s nine (voice-over: Christa Theret), and in the Summer she goes to stay with granny and grandpa. She plays on a swing, missing mum and dad, she watches a cabbage white butterfly in the garden. The house is tidy, ordered, perhaps obsessively so. It smells of polish; the kitchen smells of bleach. Tomorrow, grandpa will take her to the lake, where he likes to fish. To get to her bedroom, she must pass the big, intimidating horn mounted at the top of the stairs, a hunting trophy from a pachyderm. In her room, she can see eyes watching her from the wood grain of the ceiling timbers. She doesn’t sleep by counting sheep; she kills monsters. As the floorboards creak outside her door, she hides in the wallpaper, in the flowers, in sleep. After all, as grandma says, what could happen?

Before the trip, she accidentally pricks a finger on one of grandpa’s fishing hooks – lures, as they call them – but grandpa kisses the cut better with the kiss that heals all things.… Read the rest