Duncan Hannah

A MAGAZINE ABOUT STYLISH CINEMA

A monthly focus on the profound impact of film. Artist Duncan Hannah selects his three titles

"Duncan Hannah is a self-described 'idiosyncratic' painter, having emerged improbably from New York’s punk scene as a figurative artist obsessed with painterly technique and single-mindedly focused on reviving the narrative tradition in painting. His work is informed by mid-20th century British representational artists and American titans Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer, as well as mavericks such as Balthus and Fairfield Porter. Based in New York City, he has had over 100 solo shows since his debut in 1980. His work is in collections ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Mick Jagger. In 2011 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Hannah’s journals of the 1970’s, 'Twentieth Century Boy', were published by Knopf in 2018." (Dashwood Books)

FILM PICKS WITH

DUNCAN HANNAH

Breathless / À bout de souffle (1960) Jean-Luc Godard

"There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for Cahiers du cinéma. With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same." (Criterion)

The Conformist / Il Conformista (1970) Bernardo Bertolucci

"A repressed upper-class intellectual is hired by Mussolini's fascist goons to go to Paris and kill a leading dissident who was once his philosophy tutor. Such is the premise for one of the most poetic and influential films ever made. Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg all cite this adaptation of Alberto Moravia's novel as a profound influence on their films. Coppola even lured Bertolucci's director of photography, Vittorio Storaro, to the Philippines to bring his talents to bear on Apocalypse Now. Indeed, The Conformist is a compendium of virtuosic flourishes: the chilly framing of iconic fascist buildings such as the Esposizione Universale Roma in Rome and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; the expressionist angles when Clerici visits his dotty mother. And, best of all, the ingenious sequence in a Parisian cafe in which Clerici's reluctance to participate in a dance leaves him surrounded by a tightening spiral of dancers shot from above, making him appear to us exactly what he is: a conformist alone in any crowd. Rarely has cinema been so daring or freighted." (Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian)

Young and Innocent (1937) Alfred Hitchcock

"An underappreciated charmer from Hitchcock’s British period. Nova Pilbeam, child of The Man Who Knew Too Much, here plays a constable’s daughter who falls in with a hapless writer (Derrick de Marney) falsely accused of murdering a movie star. Their search for the real killer crisscrosses the class categories of the ever-so-English countryside as Hitchcock assembles an array of cleverly drawn types, from roadhouse tramps and canny peasants to the haughty auntie who presides over an excruciating children’s party. A startling mine-shaft rescue looks ahead to North by Northwest, and there’s foreshadowing of Notorious in a dazzling crane shot that sweeps down from the ceiling of a ballroom into the twitching eyes of a murderer. Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer called it “the most beautiful forward track to be found in the history of film.” (Juliet Clark, BAMPFA)