Film

According to the Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said, when some artists, musicians, and writers enter the last period of their lives, the sense of their own ending (whether from old age or ill health) occasions a change in their craft, a kind of ‘new idiom’ that he calls ‘late style’. While we might intuitively tend to think of old age bringing a sense of ‘reconciliation and serenity’, of ‘harmony and resolution’ to an artist’s portfolio, Said is more interested in those artists for whom the end actually marks a turning point, a shift towards ‘intransigence, difficulty and contradiction’.

Sometimes, through no deliberate strategy on the creators’ part, a film taps the Zeitgeist and takes off. Writer-director Noora Niasari’s début feature, Shayda, a very personal film that explores the courage and resilience of an Iranian woman escaping domestic violence in Melbourne, was already in post-production in September 2022 when the women-led uprising erupted in Iran, after the killing of Mahsa Amini by the morality police known officially as the Guidance Patrol.

La Chimera is the fourth feature film from Italian director and screenwriter Alice Rohrwacher, who made her feature film début in 2011 with Corpo Celeste (Heavenly Body). It is the final piece of a triptych – including Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) (2014) and Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro) (2018) – which poses, in Rohrwacher’s own words, the central question of what to do with the past.

In 1920, the figure of Hercule Poirot arrived, fully formed – from the top of his egg-shaped head to the tip of his toes – when Agatha Christie published her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. She introduced her detective in the words of an admiring narrator who was to function as a kind of Dr Watson to her Great Detective. Poirot, we are told ‘was an extraordinary looking little man, hardly more than five feet four inches, but he carried himself with great dignity’.

Some tropes in the film business are entirely divorced from the contents of any given film. One of these, oft-repeated, concerns the bright young débutante who is lavished with praise. In this narrative, the first-time director emerges from the soil in full bloom. They have made a competent movie, perhaps even a good one – though certainly not the epochal effort the adulation would have you believe.

Veteran filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman, widely considered the pre-eminent documentarian to emerge from the 1960s, has always said he considers his approach closer to that of a novelist rather than a director.

In three films by Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason, there is a moment of rupture in which the narrative is held up and we see instead a montage of various characters standing still and looking directly at the camera – an example of what has been called a planimetric shot. This particular type of shot, in which the camera is positioned directly perpendicular to its subject, appears to flatten characters against backgrounds on screen, in much the same way that a portrait photograph might.