James Quandt

Apr 1, 2024 | artforum.com | James Quandt |Rachel Wetzler |Jan Tumlir |Clifford Owens

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962) and the tradition of the musca depictaAN ODDITY IN THE OPENING CREDITS for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962) has gone largely unremarked, probably because it is so cursory.

Mar 14, 2024 | nybooks.com | James Quandt

Jury deliberations at the 2000 Istanbul Film Festival quickly turned contentious. A member who had hitherto remained so reticent that we wondered if she would ever proffer any opinion suddenly erupted with a ferocious denunciation of our choice for the festival’s top prize.

Aug 31, 2023 | nybooks.com | James Quandt

“In all my films, there is a suicide,” the French director Jean Eustache claimed upon discovering that his former girlfriend had killed herself shortly after attending a private screening of a rough cut of his film La Maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore, 1973). Eustache had transposed some of their lovers’ conversations into the script for his three-and-a-half-hour portrait of their fractious relationship, using tapes he had made with a recorder hidden under their bed.

Jun 27, 2023 | criterion.com | James Quandt

“I love life so fiercely, so desperately, that nothing good can come of it,” Pier Paolo Pasolini declared in 1960, just before he embarked on a career as a film director. In that characteristic union of euphoria and fatalism, one hears the contrarian voice of the most courageous and dangerous Italian artist of his generation.

May 1, 2023 | artforum.com | James Quandt

Cyril Schäublin, Unrest, 2022, 2K video, color, sound, 93 minutes. HOW SWISS IS IT? Cyril Schäublin, who joins the Zürcher brothers as one of the leading auteurs of the first major wave of Helvetian filmmaking since the heyday of Alain Tanner and Daniel Schmid half a century ago, appears determined in his first two features to demolish the myth of Swiss probity, especially in the echt Schweizer realms of finance and industry.