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“That’s not art. A striptease isn’t art. It’s too direct. It’s more direct than art.”

That line from Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” sums up a lot of feelings people seem to have about nudity in film. The history of painting and sculpture is full of nude portraiture, which is regularly and comfortably classified as art. But the nude scene in movies is rarely discussed alongside a Canova marble statue or Manet’s “Olympia.” Movies blur the boundaries between “real life” and artistic indirection so thoroughly that people discuss nude scenes in movies as practically everything but art. It’s “content” that deserves an “advisory,” or something akin to “porn,” however the Supreme Court is classifying that these days.

As many have noted, the very nature of the actor’s job demands the audience look at them. So when nudity enters the (literal) picture, it complicates the relationship between viewer and viewed.

The latest installment in the filmmaker's series of journal-films combining iPhone footage and sounds and images from movies. A diary penned with cinema.Journal (6.6.16 - 1.10.17)feat. additional footage from Masha Tupitsyn and Isiah MedinaMy journal-film series (of which this is the third installment) came to be as a means of resolving the points of convergence and departure amongst the environments I occupy and those which I encounter in cinema. I like to view these films as a method of managing the images that take up my thoughts and memories into a new continuity, one in which the distinction between images seen on-screen and those personally experienced is no longer absolute. In dissolving this partition, these films provide a vector for the animation conceptual concerns through cinema - montage fulfilling that which language can only formally describe and vice versa. The following essay outlines some of the concerns this film attempts...

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Farewell My Concubine (1993) is playing on Mubi May 22 - June 21, 2016 in the United States.Farewell My Concubine, the Cannes-winning, Oscar-nominated, internationally-heralded 1993 film from director Chen Kaige, is quite the busy movie. Extensive in its meticulous depiction of Chinese history, the film charts the tumultuous course of the country from 1924 to 1977, including the ups and downs of political strife, the correspondingly fluctuating social conditions, and the general upheaval brought forth by 20th century modernity. With this as its framework, and with such large-scale concerns seeping into the primary narrative one minute and delicately fading away the next, the film is all the while essentially focused on two people, actors Douzi and Shitou. From their first encounter as young boys training for the Peking Opera, to their maturation on and off the stage as full-fledged stars and complex human beings, to a seemingly sedate middle-age conclusion,...

It’s hard to believe that a film which advocates slavery and demeans black people could have a 100% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and yet this is a fact. Since its release in 1915, The Birth of a Nation has been lauded both as a work of genius, and as the epitome of bigotry. How can it be both? Cinelinx takes a look back at the highly controversial film, The Birth of a Nation on its 100th anniversary.

In 1915, D. W. Griffith was one of the hottest up-and-coming directors of the fledgling film industry, with a plan to create the first big budget film epic ever. He did just that, and for decades his magnum opus was considered to be one of the greatest films ever made, and many still believe that. However, in modern times, it has become more renowned as the most racist film in movie history. Despite the politically incorrect content,...

Like Night of the Hunter, Tod Browning’s Freaks or Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers, The Road to Yesterday can be ranked among the UFOs of cinema. It’s place in the heart of Cecil B. DeMille’s work proves to be in itself very distinctive. We know that, during his entire life, DeMille had virtually only one producer—Paramount (the former Famous Players Lasky)—just like Minnelli was MGM’s man and Corman American International’s. Sixty-three of his films (out of seventy) were produced at Paramount. And, oddly enough, it is among the seven outsiders, situated within a brief period from 1925 to 1931, that his best activity is to be found (I’m thinking of Madam Satan, The Godless Girl, and The Road to Yesterday)–his most audacious undertakings. To top it off, for this uncontested king of the box office, his best films were his biggest commercial failures.

If Audrey Hepburn was the last virgin goddess of American films, Lillian Gish was the first. Often referred to at the time as "The First Lady of the Silent Screen," she was indeed movies' first truly great actress. From her debut at age 19 in founding father D.W. Griffith's two-reel An Unseen Enemy (1912) in what I calculate as the initial year of film's golden age (plus 25 other Griffith films in less than 24 months), to her final starring masterpiece, at age 35, in Victor Sjostrom's The Wind (1928), Lillian Gish was the central player in many of the enduring treasures of cinema's earliest flowering, that essential cornerstone of the art in its purest form. She is the key figure in most of Griffith's major work, from The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Broken Blossoms (1919) to Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1922), not to mention such beautiful lesser-known gems as Hearts of the World...