Romy Schneider in archive footage from L’Enfer (1964, dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot)

Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion (1965, dir. Roman Polanski) (via)

“My aim was to show Carole’s hallucinations through the eye of the camera, augmenting their impact by using wide-angle lenses of progressively increasing scope. But in itself, that wasn’t sufficient for my purpose. I also wanted to alter the actual dimensions of the apartment — to expand the rooms and passages and push back the walls so that audiences could experience the full effect of Carole’s distorted vision.  

Accordingly we designed the walls of the set so they could be moved outward and elongated by the insertion of extra panels. When ‘stretched’ in this way, for example, the narrow passage leading to the bathroom assumed nightmarish proportions.”

-Polanski, quoted in Roman (1984)

Catherine Deneuve during the filming of Repulsion (1965, dir. Roman Polanski) (via)

Days of Heaven (1978, dir. Terrence Malick)

“At Malick’s insistence certain parts of the film were made at what he calls the ‘magic hour’, that is, the time between sunset and nightfall. From the point of view of luminosity, this period lasts about twenty minutes, so that calling it a ‘magic hour’ is an optimistic euphemism.

The light really was very beautiful, but we had little time to film scenes of long duration. All day we would work to get the actors and the camera ready; as soon as the sun had set we had to shoot quickly, not losing a moment. For these few minutes the light is truly magical, because no one knows where it is coming from. The sun is not to be seen, but the sky can be bright, and the blue of the atmosphere undergoes strange mutations.

Malick’s intuition and daring probably made these scenes the most interesting ones visually in the film. And it takes daring to convince the Hollywood old guard that the shooting day should last only twenty minutes. Even though we took advantage of this short space of time with a kind of frenzy, we often had to finish the scene the next day at the same time, because night would fall inexorably. Each day, like Joshua in the Bible, Malick wanted to stop the sun in its imperturbable course so as to go on shooting.” 

-excerpted from A Man with a Camera, the autobiography of Days of Heaven cinematographer Néstor Almendros

Burgess Meredith on the post-nuclear set of “Time Enough to Last” (1959)

“The best laid plans of mice and men and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis, in the Twilight Zone.”

-Rod Serling, “Time Enough at Last”, The Twilight Zone

Mildred Harris in The Little Soldier Man (1915) (via)

Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes (1948, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger) (via)

Rita Hayworth & Orson Welles in publicity still for The Lady From Shanghai (1947, dir. Orson Welles) (via)

Q. What was the Hollywood reaction generally to [The Lady From Shanghai]?

Welles: Friends avoided me. Whenever it was mentioned, people would clear their throats and change the subject very quickly out of consideration for my feelings. I only found out that it was considered a good picture when I got to Europe. The first nice thing I ever heard about it from an American was from Truman Capote. One night in Sicily, he quoted whole pages of dialogue word for word.

Q. I guess that’s called being ahead of your time.

Welles: It’s called being in trouble.

-excerpted from This Is Orson Welles

8 1/2 (1963, dir. Federico Fellini)

Clara Kimball Young in Lola (1914, dir. James Young)

In the film, sweet & virtuous Lola is killed in a car accident. She is restored to life, by means of her scientist father’s electric ray machine, but too late to prevent Death from carrying off her soul. The now soulless Lola promptly turns into an amoral jezebel who enjoys anonymous beach sex and making men cry with statements like, ”When a man says to me, ‘I want the only things you have - your beauty, your youth, your love,’ haven’t I the right to say, ‘What will you give me for them?’” 

Order is restored when “too much excitement” (i.e. too many adulterous orgasms) fatally weakens her heart, and her heartbroken father, having learned his lesson, lets her go.