retrospective

In 1954, a 19-year-old girl named Sylvette David sauntered past Pablo Picasso’s window. The aging artist was instantly beguiled. A few weeks later, he revealed a portrait of David, the first of 60 that he would paint that spring. She became his inspiration, his…

With U.S.-China tensions at the center of so much of our discourse, it seems as good a time as any to look at a figure who channeled those same fraught energies into something constructive and inspiring. A twentysomething living in Beijing in the 1980s,…

After a first encounter, Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye seemed ripe for being written off as a Wong Kar-wai copycat — at best an adept craftsman of soft-focus, woozily shot images of beautiful men and women, bathed in shadow, moving kinetically through rain-streaked city streets.…

When Hong Sang-soo made his debut feature, 1996’s The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, the South Korean cinema had not yet developed into the internationally acknowledged movement it is today. With accomplished debuts from Lee Chang-dong and Bong Joon-ho coming soon after, Hong…

Sion Sono, known to most as a director of brutally violent films like 2002’s Suicide Club, can claim at least three titles in his filmography that contain the word “love.” The best of these, and indeed the 54-year-old Japanese iconoclast’s masterpiece-to-date, is 2011’s Love Exposure, a four-hour exorcism of acrimonious…

Originally published August 15th, 2011 One of the most important filmmakers of the last 30 years emerged from a country famous for its brutal censorship, a nation that forces many artists to take up residence elsewhere if they wish to freely pursue their craft…