My Affair with Art House Cinema
Essays and Reviews
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- $43.99
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- $43.99
Publisher Description
Finalist, 2025 PEN / Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, PEN America
Phillip Lopate fell hard for the movies as an adolescent. As he matured into an acclaimed critic and essayist, his infatuation deepened into a lifelong passion. My Affair with Art House Cinema presents Lopate’s selected essays and reviews from the last quarter century, inviting readers to experience films he found exhilarating, tantalizing, and beguiling—and sometimes disappointing or frustrating—through his keen eyes.
In an essayist’s sinuous prose style, Lopate captures the formal mastery, artistic imagination, and emotional intensity of art house essentials like Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, as well as works by contemporary filmmakers such as Maren Ade, Hong Sang-soo, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Christian Petzold, Paolo Sorrentino, and Jafar Panahi. Essays explore Chantal Akerman’s rigorous honesty, Ingmar Bergman’s intimacy, Abbas Kiarostami’s playfulness, Kenji Mizoguchi’s visual style, and Frederick Wiseman’s vision of the human condition. Lopate also reflects on the work of fellow critics, including Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. His considered, at times contrarian critiques and celebrations will inspire readers to watch or rewatch these films. Above all, this book showcases Lopate’s passionate advocacy for not only particular films and directors but also the joys and value of a filmgoing culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic Lopate (A Year and a Day) opines on the films of Ingmar Bergman, Carl Dreyer, and Andrei Tarkovsky, among others, in this splendid collection. The commentary is uniformly celebratory, as when Lopate lauds Dreyer's "gliding camera movements" in Gertrud and Tarkovsky's ability to "crash through the surface of ordinary life" with long, unbroken takes that capture "deeper truths underlying the ephemeral moment." Elsewhere, Lopate recounts how he found Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort "thin and insubstantial" upon the film's release but came to appreciate its value "as a painful fairy tale about yearning" after rewatching the musical decades later. Though there's disappointingly few female filmmakers featured, Lopate does praise Lena Dunham's debut, Tiny Furniture, for its realistic portrayal of young adulthood, as well as Chantal Akerman's documentary No Home Movie for its tender portrait of the director's relationship with her elderly mother. Elsewhere, Lopate expounds on Bergman's "muzzy affection for human frailty" in Scenes from a Marriage, David Lynch's surrealist flourishes in Mulholland Drive, and Yasujirō Ozu's dramatization of parent-child conflict in Late Spring. The essays breeze by, enlivened by Lopate's punchy prose and palpable love of cinema. Cinephiles will cherish this.
