In February 1996, following a year of celebrations marking the centenary of cinema, a two-page article in theNew York Times Magazinemourned the passing of a particular era in the first one hundred years of the medium’s history. Penned by Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema” recalls with bittersweet melancholy an age of cinephilia “born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of...

For more than three years in the late 1990s I worked as the film programmer at George Eastman House / International Museum of Photography and Film, one of the largest film archives in the United States. As programmer I was responsible for conceptualizing film series and programming approximately 270 evening screenings per year in the museum’s on-site Dryden Theatre. One of the series I put together, “Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture,” comprised eight feature films on the subject of filmmaking and was scheduled in the early summer of 1998. The choices were eclectic and based on various factors,...

At the midpoint ofL’avventura(1960) is a curious scene that seems to serve little narrative function. Sandro, whose lover Anna has recently disappeared during a sailing excursion among the Aeolian Islands, arrives by train in the Sicilian city of Messina to find a journalist who may have information as to her whereabouts. It is midday, and there’s a riot going on. A large, boisterous crowd of men swarms the street. Sirens blaring, four jeeps heaving with police cut through the throng, trailed by a string of photographers and reporters. Shouldering his way through the scrum, Sandro discovers the source...

Contemporaneous with the trope of the wandering woman in European art cinema of the early 1960s was a particular film form that has been all but ignored in film historical writing concerning European cinema of the period: the omnibus film, a multidirector film constituted as a combination of episodes, each singly authored yet connected to others in contiguity to form a whole. Significantly, the figure of woman serves as a unifying trope for several postwar Italian and French (frequently Italo-French) omnibus films whose segments were directed by prominent art cinema auteurs. An early instance isSiamo donne(We, the Women,...