Daily Archives: September 14, 2022

Otto Preminger

This was written in the mid-1970s for Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, a two-volume reference work edited by Richard Roud that wasn’t published until 1980 (by The Viking Press in the U.S. and Secker & Warburg in the U.K.), and reprinted in my collection Essential Cinema. — J.R.

Otto Preminger (born 1906) directed five films before Laura (1944) — one Austrian, four American — but since he disowns them, I haven’t seen them, and no commentator to my knowledge has ever spoken well of them, we might as well begin with the (false) assumption that a tabula rasa preceded his early masterpiece.

False assumptions — and clean slates that tend to function like mirrors — are usually central to our experience of Preminger’s work. His narrative lines are strewn with deceptive counter-paths, shifting viewpoints, and ambiguous characters who perpetually slip out of static categories and moral definitions, so that one can be backed out of a conventionally placid Hollywood mansion driveway by somebody and something called Angel Face (1952) (and embodied by Jean Simmons) only to be hurtled without warning over the edge of a cliff. As for tabulae rasae, there is Angel Face herself and her numerous weird sisters — among them Maggie McNamara in The Moon Is Blue (1953), Jean Seberg in Saint Joan (1957) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Eva Marie Saint in Exodus (1960) and, closer to the cradle, the almost invisible Bunny Lake in Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) and Alexandra Hay in Skidoo (1968). Read more

Woodchuck Dreams: Field Notes From the Frozen North

Here’s a recent essay by one of my oldest friends, illustrated by her husband, Bob Fisher. The essay originally appeared in Blueline 43. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without permission of the author. — J.R.

Bibi Wein

The first snow bedazzles. Overnight, it has transformed our brooding boreal woods into an enchanted forest. I rush around and look at everything: the familiar contours of the land reshaped and luminous, the frost a billion stars twinkling on the hemlock needles in the sunlight. In this incandescent world middle age falls away for a moment, and I am once again the girl of so many decades past, my energies ignited by a spark of freedom and discovery that city girl never knew.

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Three days later, I ponder the beauty of blizzards. I must admit I love a storm, though it can make me anxious if I’m alone. In winter, that’s rare these days in the log cabin I share with my husband Bob. The isolation of two is very different from the isolation of one.  With the protection of shelter and companionship, a storm turns me back into a child. Snowed in, all work is off, especially if the power fails. Read more