Michael J. Anderson, Director of Curatorial Affairs
About: In 2013, Anderson earned his Ph.D. in History of Art and Film Studies from Yale University. Anderson has been published on a wide variety of film topics, including new Iranian cinema, the French new wave, post-war Japanese film, Bollywood, 21st century Hollywood and the work of Howard Hawks, the subject of his dissertation. Anderson was the long-time proprietor of two award-winning film and visual arts blogs, Tativille and Ten Best Films.
Made less than a half decade after the introduction of color television, and long before the new technology had supplanted its black-and-white ancestor, writer-director Frank Tashlin’s full-color, Cinemascope masterpiece Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) assails its visual storytelling competition. The key moment comes more than half way through the filmmaker’s spastically funny Madison Avenue-satire, when the titular… Learn More
Around the mid-1980s, Asia began to emerge as a significant rival to Europe in the production of art cinema of the highest quality. In the Middle East, Iran witnessed the emergence of a new generation of post-Revolution filmmakers led by the comparatively experimental work of Abbas Kiarostami, who got his start before the Revolution, and by the younger,… Learn More
The preeminent feature of Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s (b.: 1975) cinema is the human body. Set among the mythic figures of Western civilization, both fictional and historical—from Sancho Panza and Count Dracula to Casanova, the three Magi, and now the “Sun King,” France’s Louis XIV—Serra’s films place special emphasis on the physical, bodily presence of… Learn More
By 1939, in the work of Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956), the cinema achieved a measure of formal brilliance and complexity that it has very rarely matched, and still hasn’t surpassed, in the nearly eighty years since. With The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939), which is often considered the pinnacle of the director’s prewar career, and… Learn More
In the freedom that emerged in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the repressed returned to screens on both sides of the Allied Atlantic. In the United States, it went by the name of film noir, a now-iconic generic classification that brought cynical stories and dark pools of shadow to American movie-houses. German and Eastern… Learn More
In its sixty-seventh year, the Berlinale, or Berlin International Film Festival, continues to function as one of the better barometers for the current climate of world cinema. It is in Berlin, after all, that X-Men universe blockbusters (Logan) and generations-late sequels (T2 Trainspotting)–I didn’t happen to see either–receive their international, red-carpet premieres, next to ethnographic… Learn More
Roberto Rossellini’s 1950 masterwork The Flowers of St. Francis, whose Italian title, Francesco, giullare di Dio translates as “Francis, God’s Jester,” seeks less to tell the story of its saint’s life than to show the impact of “the Franciscan message… and spirit” on its followers. This axiomatic expression of Italian neorealism depicts both scenes from the life… Learn More
Thanks to the continual health of the international art cinema, a deeper dive into recent Chinese independent filmmaking, key restorations, and a Jean Renoir program precipitated by the Museum’s “Matisse in His Time” exhibition, Oklahoma City audiences had many fine alternatives to the multiplex in 2016. Among the more than seventy new releases that Museum Films programmed during that… Learn More
Once stupidly dismissed by French film critic and director François Truffaut as a “contradiction of terms,” the British cinema was responsible for a great number of outstanding films throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, first with the poetical, wartime non-fiction of Humphrey Jennings (Listen to Britain) and the myth-focused collaborations of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (The Life… Learn More
A Catalan filmmaker and educator whose body-of-work consists predominately of documentaries and shorts, José Luis Guerín achieved universal acclaim with his fictional 2007 feature, In the City of Sylvia, a minimally plotted portrait of an artist who falls under the spell of the titular Sylvia. Comprised, for much of its frequently dialogue-free duration, of shot/counter-shot sequences of the artist observing café… Learn More
Back To Top
