Ben Parker
Ben Parker has written about movies for Film Quarterly, Artforum, and The Paris Review. He writes about novels on his blog Translations from Life. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
By Ben Parker
| March 3, 2015
High and Low was shot using the TohoScope process, drastically widening the frame for an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. However much the social and moral themes of the film are posed along the vertical axis—in Japanese, the title is Tengoku to jigoku, “Heaven and Hell”—the images and compositions are constrained to the horizontal.
By Ben Parker
| October 21, 2014
In Scorsese’s movies, the main character is time and again faced with the dilemma, “Why am I what I say I am?” These men go forth to prove their souls without any guarantee. This is not necessarily a matter of deception or even self-deception.