Tiago's brain dump

If someone asked me what was, in my opinion, one of the most damaging things to have ever happened to the movie industry, I would have replied, with no margin for doubt, the creation of the  Hays Code  in the US, in 1930, which laid out rules to which movies had to abide in order to be deemed "acceptable". In any other point in history, this code would have been quickly dismissed as the Puritan daydream it was; right after the Great Depression, however, movie executives were much more inclined to accept it, fearing boycotts to all "unacceptable" movies organized by e.g. the National Legion of Decency . As a result, during the 30 years that followed, movies in the US were required to uphold the sanctity of marriage, the rightness of the law and the sanctity of religion, aiming thus at "rebuilding human beings exhausted with the realities of life". There was no crime without punishment, nor a good deed without reward, and anything that could be construe...

Ingmar Bergman 's Persona and David Lynch 's Eraserhead (1977) are very peculiar movies. Both are experiments in film-making conducted by renowned directors with full control over the final product, fiercely defying conventions and, in the process, leaving so many questions unanswered that they end up alienating a great part of their viewers. Their uniqueness, however, has influenced the work of several acclaimed directors, most famously Stanley Kubrick , who openly adored Eraserhead , and Robert Altman , whose masterpiece, 3 Women (1977), draws very closely from Persona . Yet, while Eraserhead tends to be relegated to the cult movie circuit nowadays, Persona  still figures prominently in countless Great Movies lists, being one of the most written about movies I can think of... Why? One night, after having appeared in the play Electra , Elisabet Vogler ( Liv Ullmann ) makes the sudden decision to stop talking. Having ultimately entered a near catatonic state, Elisabet...

Ivan the Terrible is the perfect example that a movie is not made in a vacuum, being shaped instead as the result of its director's handling of external pressures. In the case of Sergei Eisenstein , even though he had to struggle with having his revolutionary ideals crushed by the power of Joseph Stalin and his creative process restricted by the draconian rules of Socialist Realism , he still managed to create (albeit not to finish) a daring story about a paranoiac leader in a a diseased surveillance state while living in Stalin's USSR. The trilogy chronicles the life of Czar Ivan IV ( Nikolai Cherkasov ) from his ascension to power, in Part I, going through his confrontation with the aristocracy, in Part II, up until his acquisition of absolute power over a unified Russian state, in Part III. As friends and family plot against him, he grows increasingly paranoiac, being ultimately forced to become the tyrant he is now known for, learning that with great power comes not...