19 April 2021
Chapter 30: Stillness
Cinema is an art of action, isn’t it? Or is it? Directors such as Angela Schanelec, Anouk Leopold, Kira Muratova, Chantal Akerman, Sharon Lockhart and Pakistan’s Sabiha Sumar, among others, will show us the pleasures and beauty held in a moment of stillness.
Chapter 31: Leaving Out
Films show the world, but what happens when they don’t show something? In this chapter, some of the great filmmakers from around the world leave out a moment, a scene, and their films are all the better for it.
Chapter 32: Revelation
- Closely linked to the previous chapter is this one, its opposite. How does Lynne Ramsay reveal her subject in Morvern Callar? How do the great actor-director Kinuyo Tanaka, or Sarah Polley, or Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher do it?
Chapter 33: Memory
Since cinema is a kind of time machine, it is no surprise that it is wonderful at memory. In this chapter we will explore rare cinematic gems about memory in films made by filmmakers including Petra Costa, Maria Plyta from Greece, Dorota Kędzierzawska from Poland, Věra Chytilová, Mai Zetterling and Mati Diop.
Chapter 34: Time
Every filmmaker has to think about time. As this chapter shows, Alice Guy-Blaché, Chantal Akerman, Ildikó Enyedi from Hungary, Hanna Polak, Marie Menken and Sally Potter have done so magnificently.
Chapter 35: Inner Life
Novels are wonderful at depicting thoughts, but how do films do it? In this chapter we will see how great directors from France, Ukraine, England, America, New Zealand and Algeria have used time in their films.
Chapter 36: The Meaning of Life
In the final chapters of our story, we will look at the bigger things in life. Here we will watch great filmmakers from all over the world and from many eras try to capture the essence of life.
Chapter 37: Love
Films can soar with love, and they can also become overly sentimental because of it. In this chapter we will look at wonderful films from China, Sri Lanka, America, Hungary, Iran, New Zealand, France, Britain, Korea, Türkiye and Hong Kong that manage to avoid the pitfalls of the subject.
Chapter 38: Death
As it is the most important subject in life, and the most universal, it is no surprise that the great filmmakers in this chapter, including Kinuyo Tanaka from Japan, Caroline Leaf from Canada, Ana Mariscal from Spain and Paula van der Oest from the Netherlands, embrace it.
Chapter 39: Endings
We will begin to bring our epic road movie to a close with films by Sonja Heiss, Larisa Shepitko, Ida Lupino, Lizzie Borden, Claire Denis and Maya Deren.
Chapter 40: Song and Dance
They say you should leave with a song, and so that is how our story ends. Huang Shuqin from China, Vera Stroyeva from Russia, Margaret Tait from Scotland, Alice Guy, Edith Carlmar, Céline Sciamma, Gilda de Abreu from Brazil, Joan Micklin Silver from America, the great Shirley Clarke, Dorothy Arzner and Beyoncé will make music with their films.
We bring our story, our road movie, to a close, and we end it in an unexpected place…