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The seventeenth entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi will be showing F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) from October 24 - November 22, 2016 in the United States.Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931) liked to compare film with architecture. And from his earliest works, we see a strong pictorial intelligence at work, carefully marrying the architectural characteristics of a location or set with the further geometry imposed upon these given elements by the choice of camera angle. This amounted to far more than a flashy, modish expressionism of stark, plunging lines of intersecting walls, or actors inching along the diagonals of a frame; it became the basis for an entire, integrated system of mise en scène. What Murnau aimed for, above all, was not static, painterly effects but what he called a dynamic ‘mobile architecture’ specific to cinema.This quality of mobile architecture is what Éric Rohmer...

The following article accompanies the audiovisual essay Paratheatre - Plays Without Stages (From I to IV) by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López and commissioned by Chris Luscri for the 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival premiere of Jacques Rivette's 1971 magnum opus Out 1 - Noli me tangere.

In Jacques Rivette’s monumental Out 1 (1971), we see two theatrical works perpetually in progress — until, due to the force of many factors both internal and external, both projects collapse. Yet what we witness are not, in any conventional or normative sense, rehearsals. They are more like what Jerzy Grotwoski called paratheatre: playing without a stage, without an audience ever in mind or in attendance, playing for the sake of playing itself, for the process of working it out and working it through.

Every critical commentary on Out 1 (and its double, Out 1: Spectre from 1974) refers to the prominent place in it of theatre — a prominent place it enjoys,...

Jean-Luc Godard, 1965

No film-maker of the 60s embodies that tumultuous decade as thoroughly as Jean-Luc Godard, whose ceaseless, unresting innovation led others into a new realm of radical politics and extreme formal experimentation. But few could match his invention and idiosyncrasy – by the end of the decade Pauline Kael noted: "The corpses of his imitators littered the world's film festivals."

Alphaville is one of his more approachable works, a sort of retro-futuristic noir that partakes equally of Raymond Chandler, Jean Cocteau and Leon Trotsky. It offers an inspiration for the dystopian futurescape of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and has strong parallels with John Boorman's Point Blank (both films could happily have used Alphaville's original title: Tarzan Vs Ibm).

Sam Spade-like shamus Lemmy Caution arrives in Alphaville – a modernist, steel-and-glass Paris by night, as captured by Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Raoul Coutard – to confront its logic-based, computer-governed reality and...