Author Spotlight

Imogen Sara Smith

Imogen Sara Smith is the author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City and Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. Her writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Cineaste, Reverse Shot, and other publications.

42 Results
Writing Women in the 1930s

At a time when women were understood to be the primary audience for movies, Hollywood studios built vehicles for actresses that doubled as showcases for the industry’s many brilliant female screenwriters.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Unforgotten Ancestors: Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

This year, Bologna’s annual feast of restorations and rediscoveries showcased one of the most ambitious masterpieces of the silent era, the melodramas of Japanese filmmaker Kozaburo Yoshimura, and other treasures of film history.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Great Adaptations: Columbia in the 1950s

Perhaps the most hard-to-categorize of the great Hollywood studios came into its own with a string of critically acclaimed films based on popular books and plays, including Born Yesterday, A Raisin in the Sun, and From Here to Eternity.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Cinema Revolutionary: Fernando de Fuentes in Morelia

The subject of a revelatory retrospective at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival, this groundbreaking director ushered in Mexican cinema’s golden age with vibrant explorations of the nation’s folk traditions and revolutionary past.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons: Another Year

Through its echoes, resonances, and intricately branching stories, this cycle of films evokes the feeling that life, like the weather, is based on patterns too complex to ever be fully predictable.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Don’t Fence Her In: On Women of the West

A string of important midcentury westerns, including Johnny Guitar and Rancho Notorious, elevated women from their traditionally marginal role in the genre to more potent and central positions.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Bright Lights, Dark Dreams: Alejandro Galindo in Morelia

This great director from the golden age of Mexican cinema drew upon a wide range of styles to explore the conflict between tradition and modernity.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Dark Passages

Ghost Town: Nights on Bunker Hill

With its rambling Victorian mansions and seedy charms, the once-exclusive area of downtown Los Angeles was film noir’s favorite neighborhood.

By Imogen Sara Smith

High Sierra: Crashing Out

In Raoul Walsh’s elegy for the Depression-era archetype of the noble outlaw, Humphrey Bogart plays an old-fashioned desperado who has outlived his time.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Now Voyageurs: Il Cinema Ritrovato 2021

In the thirty-fifth edition of the Italian festival dedicated to restored films, an eclectic lineup underscores the transportive physicality of cinema after a long year stuck at home.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Dark Passages

Dancing in the Dark

A powerful motif in film noir from around the world, dance is by turns a tool of seduction, a source of humiliation, and a symbol of the pleasures and risks of spectatorship.

By Imogen Sara Smith

When Hollywood Was a Writers’ Town: A Conversation with Philippe Garnier

In this sprawling interview, the veteran French journalist recounts the long, eccentric research journey behind his newly translated portrait of the writers who fueled American cinema in the thirties and forties.

By Imogen Sara Smith

People and Places of Scoundrels & Spitballers

Tinseltown’s golden age comes to life in this supplemental guide to our conversation with journalist Philippe Garnier.

By Imogen Sara Smith

The Cameraman: Man with a Movie Camera

Buster Keaton struggled with higher-ups at MGM while making his last great film, which the studio would later hold up as a model of a perfectly constructed comedy.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Stepping Out: On Watching Women Walk

A pedestrian activity becomes a radical vision in Elevator to the Gallows, La notte, Vagabond, and other films that follow their female stars on foot.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Dark Passages

Hotel Noir

From the squalid to the generic, cheap hotels serve as a quintessential habitat for the lonely, transitory people in crime cinema.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Dark Passages

On the Waterfront

Pessimism, melancholy, and corruption come in with the tide in the greatest seaside noirs, including classics by Josef von Sternberg, Ingmar Bergman, and Marcel Carné.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Dark Passages

Bitter Harvest

Three noirs from 1949 plough up the dark underbelly of agriculture, exploring the corrupt system that puts food on our tables.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Look Back in Rapture: Il Cinema Ritrovato

Bologna’s annual celebration of classic movies is a site of endless discovery, inspiring new ways of thinking about our nostalgia for cinema’s past.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Swing Time: Heaven Can’t Wait

In their most sublime collaboration, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers perfected a seamless blend of song, dance, and swooning romance.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Shooting Stars

With the help of MGM’s most ingenious photographers, screen goddesses like Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford made the still portrait a key part of their artistry.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Dark Passages

Least Wanted—Film Noir’s Character Actors: Harry Morgan

In Frank Borzage’s Southern Gothic noir Moonrise, the actor captures a heartbreaking mixture of love and fear with his deeply empathetic (and very brief) portrayal of a deaf-mute.

By Imogen Sara Smith

Dark Passages

Least Wanted—Film Noir’s Character Actors: Wallace Ford

A haven for aging Hollywood actors, film noir had plenty of room for performers like Wallace Ford, who brought a hard-scrabble energy to the roles of has-beens and losers.

By Imogen Sara Smith

The Birth of a Quiet Radical: John M. Stahl’s Silent Films

Long thought lost or unavailable, John M. Stahl’s early films highlight his mastery of melodrama, combining elegant framing with explosive emotions and a commitment to exploring women’s experience.

By Imogen Sara Smith