Desert Bloom

THE SHELTERING SKY from Arrow is the latest Blu-ray to feature a video essay by Fiona and I, with Stephen C, Horne editing. A fascinating and challenging film to write about. Lost in Transit covers Vittorio Storaro’s highly personal colour theories, book v. film, the positioning of TSS in Bertolucci’s career, and much, much more.

I hope you’ll buy — but I also and even more so hope you’ll buy my novel, We Used Dark Forces, available at Amazon US and UK and you can also read it on Kindle Unlimited and I get paid by the page, like Henry Miller doing his Parisian porn.

I could never be bothered with a Patreon page but buying the book is a way of supporting Shadowplay but it’s not just a donation — you get 250+ pages of hand-curated words in the form of a funny story with the continuation of characters created in my short film THE NORTHLEACH HORROR. So you can treat it as a book or as a means of tipping for the daily content here.

Thief or Thieves?

In America, seemingly, it’s called THE BICYCLE THIEF. In Britain, BICYCLE THIEVES. In Italy, LADRI DI BICICLETTE. The Italian title is correct, the British one and accurate translation, the US one an abberation.

Since we spend the film following two characters, father and son, the plural FEELS right, but of course only the father is a thief, the other thief is the guy who stole HIS bike.

Eventually I suppose everyone in Rome will have stolen everyone else’s bike, but meanwhile here is the new Blu-ray from Arrow, which has a video essay I made with ace editor Alex Starr.

Bicycle Thieves [Blu-ray]

This Sweltering Guy

The word is out —

Fiona, Stephen C. Horne and I have contributed a video essay to the forthcoming Arrow Blu-ray on Bertolucci’s THE SHELTERING SKY. It streets in November.

One thing we missed —

I identified the above shot as an echo of Orson Welles —

And I think I was bang on, given Bertolucci’s talk of his Wellesian influence. What I overlooked, but producer Neil Snowden pointed out, is a more direct connection —

Now, I don’t know if Coppola had a great influence on Bertolucci generally — I know the reverse is true — but Vittorio Storaro shot both APOCALYPSE NOW and THE SHELTERING SKY so that is, one might say, highly relevant. A case of me leapfrogging past the fundamental in search of the obscure.