Totally, Tenderly, Tragically

Phillip Lopate has been obsessed with movies from the start. As an undergraduate at Columbia, he organized the school's first film society. Later, he even tried his own hand at filmmaking. But it was not until his ascent as a major essayist that Lopate found his truest and most lasting contribution to the medium. And, over the past twenty-five years, tackling subjects ranging from Visconti to Jerry Lewis, from the first New York Film Festival to the thirty-second, Phillip Lopate has made film his most cherished subject. Here, in one place, are the very best of these essays, a joy for anyone who loves movies.Introduction

MEMORIES

Anticipation of La Notte: The “Heroic” Age of Moviegoing
The First New York Film Festival—1963
Three on a Couch: Jerry Lewis Adjusts
Contempt: The Story of a Marriage
Antonioni’s Cronaca
Diary of a Country Priest: Films as Spiritual Life
Fassbinder’s Despair


FILMS AND FILMMAKERS

The Operatic Realism of Luchino Visconti
The World According to Makavejev
Fourteen Koans by a Levite on Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ
Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door
David Lynch’s Wild at Heart
Kenji Mizoguchi
The Legacy of John Cassavetes
A Taste for Naruse
Sidney Lumet, or The Necessity for Compromise
The Experimental Films of Warren Sonbert
Three Ozu Films from the Fifties

CAN MOVIES THINK?

The Passion of Pauline Kael
The Gallant Andrew Sarris
The Last Taboo: The Dumbing Down of American Movies
In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film
When Writers Direct
The Images of Children in Film
The 32nd New York Film Festival
Interview with Abbas Kiarostami
Was It a Montage for You, Too, My Dear?

Index
Phillip Lopate is the author of the essay collections Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, and Portrait of My Body. He has also written the novels The Rug Merchant and Confessions of a Summer. Lopate is the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay and the Library of America's Writing New York, as well as the series editor of The Art of the Essay. His film criticism appears regularly in The New York Times and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.