John Tottenham

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Rendezvous With Rohmer

John Tottenham
When the films of Eric Rohmer were first shown, they must have appeared like nothing that had been seen in a cinema before: all talk and no action, without any ...
Night and fog: The Man From London

Outsider Cinema: Bela Tarr Series at LACMA

John Tottenham
(Click to enlarge) Night and fog: The Man From London The title of Bela Tarr’s second feature, The Outsider (1981), could apply to almost every character in every one of his films. The doleful compassion always present in his work is most vividly displayed here and in the other two......
Yojimbo; Credit: The Criterion Collection

Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars

John Tottenham
The Criterion Collection (Click to enlarge) Yojimbo When Sergio Leone shifted the action of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo from a windswept silk-trading outpost to a sun-drenched Mexican border town, he ran a blade through the traditional Western, stripping it down and opening it up, eviscerating its tiresome romantic subplots, upping the......

Russ Meyer: Porn to Be Wild

John Tottenham
The late Russ Meyer was probably the only director whose works were equally at home in the art house and the porn theater, and in both venues the audience got a lot more than it anticipated. The presence of heroines with gravity-defying fun bags was by no means Meyer's only......