James Dalrymple
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jamesewand.bsky.social
James Dalrymple
@jamesewand.bsky.social
1.6K followers 1K following 13K posts
Teaching/lecturing in France. Occasional academic.

Cinema, books, music, vintage television, podcasts (usually while cooking for the family), teaching, life in France etc.

Film reviews at: letterboxd.com/jamesewand/
Posts Replies Media Videos
jamesewand.bsky.social
a few (rambling) thoughts on Journey to Italy. It's been quite a journey for me, too
letterboxd.com/jamesewand/f...
A ★★★★ review of Journey to Italy (1954)
"Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun" There’s a funny scene in Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy that reminds me of the Noel Coward song, which famously notes how “Englishmen det...
letterboxd.com
November 11, 2025 at 9:50 AM
jamesewand.bsky.social
A propos of nothing, Once Upon a Time in the West was the most popular film in France in 1969, selling over 14 million tickets (!), quite a bit more than in Italy and several times more than in the US.

Even though I wasn't even born then, I miss this France!
November 11, 2025 at 7:59 AM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
cinefeast33.bsky.social
#NowWatching UNDER THE SUN OF SATAN (1987). Director: Maurice Pialat. Gerard Depardieu, Sandrine Bonnaire.

This French film took top honors at Cannes Film Festival. Conflicted country Priest finds purpose in befriending woman accused of murder.

#filmsky 📽
Poster for Under the Sun of Satan
November 11, 2025 at 5:15 AM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
johnmulvey.bsky.social
The new Noura Mint Seymali album is out today and it's one of my favourites of the year. Listen here: noura-mint-seymali.bandcamp.com/album/yenbett
Yenbett, by Noura Mint Seymali
15 track album
noura-mint-seymali.bandcamp.com
November 7, 2025 at 11:53 AM
jamesewand.bsky.social
Now listening:
Steve Gunn - Daylight Daylight
stevegunn.bandcamp.com/album/daylig...
Daylight Daylight, by Steve Gunn
7 track album
stevegunn.bandcamp.com
November 10, 2025 at 3:36 PM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
realismfan55.bsky.social
Here is a chronicle of authors, books & some of the cinema, dedicated to a passion of mine, the "Kitchen Sink" novels & books that have personally influenced my journey, I term one of the "love affairs of my life", spanning 42 yrs. I do hope some of you enjoy reading & can relate too 😊 J x
💙📚
📽️
Kitchen Sink Drama & Social Realism
Kitchen Sink Drama : Poor Cow, Kes, A Kind Of Loving, Billy Liar, Room At The Top, Up The Junction, Career Girls & Brassed Off.
soulandmod.com
March 2, 2025 at 3:36 AM
jamesewand.bsky.social
The university library has sourced this for me
📚💙
Cover of 'The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama', by Jason Jacobs, featuring a still from the BBC's 1955 adaptation of Nineteen Eighty Four, adapted by Nigel Kneale and starring Roy Oxley as Big Brother
November 10, 2025 at 1:46 PM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
darrellclem.bsky.social
1/2
First watch: LATE SPRING (Japanese, 1949) is a lovely film that finds a 27-year-old daughter wanting to stay with her father to care for him in their happy home.

Yet she is pushed unwillingly toward marriage due to societal expectations and an interfering aunt.
#FilmSky #MovieSky
Late Spring is one of director Ozu’s best films.
November 10, 2025 at 4:16 AM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
staggerlee42.bsky.social
It has been a slow year for me but I would probably say ‘Ran’ at the QFT. Seeing the colours popping off the screen, the landscape unfolding in awe-inspiring scope and the complex choreography of the conflict depicted was memorable. Made for the Big Screen.
bwdr.bsky.social Bright Wall/Dark Room @bwdr.bsky.social · 2d
What is the best movie not from this year that you’ve seen this year? Bonus points if you say why
November 9, 2025 at 8:44 AM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
eggsbened.bsky.social
Hands up who knew Claude Rains, who starred in Gaslight, Casablanca, Notorious, Now Voyager, 3 other Bette Davis pictures (among umpteen others) was born in Clapham in 1889, one of 12 children only 3 of whom survived, and taught John Gielgud and Charles Laughton at RADA? Happy Birthday, Claude.
November 10, 2025 at 8:16 AM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
steadytiger.bsky.social
This Korean book of horror stories for kids goes pretty hard
Page from a book with Korean writing and a very disturbing illustration of an insane looking boy holding a dead cat dripping with blood
November 9, 2025 at 9:53 AM
jamesewand.bsky.social
First watch: Fear (1954). One of three (!) films Roberto Rossellini released in 1954 starring then-wife Ingrid Bergman. Unlike the modernist Journey to Italy, this German-Italian production looks to the past, and particularly the noirish Hollywood suspense films for which Bergman was famous. 1/5
The poster for Fear (Italian: La Paura or German: Angst), 1954, directed by Roberto Rosselini and starring Ingrid Bergman
November 10, 2025 at 7:34 AM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
seanjcostello.bsky.social
Watched this gripping wartime noir by Powell & Pressburger
Cover of the Criterion edition of The Small Back Room (1949) featuring Kathleen Byron and David Farrar
November 9, 2025 at 11:03 PM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
rufustsuperfly.bsky.social
Lovely story.
Cool kid with an even cooler mother:
“Art and museums are living spaces,” she said. “Life without art is not life.”
apnews.com/article/louv...
Fedora man unmasked: Meet the teen behind the Louvre mystery photo
Fifteen-year-old Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux has become an internet sensation after an Associated Press photo captured him outside the Louvre on the day of a crown jewels heist.
apnews.com
November 10, 2025 at 12:28 AM
jamesewand.bsky.social
Apologies in advance but it looks like I'll be watching another Roberto Rossellini film tonight
November 9, 2025 at 6:09 PM
jamesewand.bsky.social
Now listening:
www.oneheatminute.com/guide-for-th...
Episode 21: “The Naked Spur” with Scout Tafoya — One Heat Minute Productions
Author, critic, and filmmaker Scout Tafoya’s most recent book is “The Black Book: An Anthony Mann Reader,” and he joins us to discuss one of Mann’s best-regarded pictures, the James Stewart Western “T...
www.oneheatminute.com
November 9, 2025 at 11:20 AM
jamesewand.bsky.social
a few thoughts on Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli (1950), which I enjoyed earlier this week
letterboxd.com/jamesewand/f...
A ★★★★ review of Stromboli (1950)
A beautiful, displaced Lithuanian woman gets buyer's remorse when she marries an Italian Prisoner of War, who takes her back to his village on the isolated eponymous island of Stromboli, a deeply cons...
letterboxd.com
November 9, 2025 at 11:15 AM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
steadytiger.bsky.social
Plein Soleil on EBS. Never seen this before!
Title card for Plein Soleil on a TV set
November 9, 2025 at 4:52 AM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
steadytiger.bsky.social
Senso (1954). For these two hours, Alida Valli is the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen, and that splendidly sculpted, infinitely mobile face goes on a hell of a journey. Farley Granger too is very interesting in Italian. It really unlocks the devil in him
Poster for Senso
November 8, 2025 at 6:16 PM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
jacquiwine.bsky.social
New on the blog today, I've written about CROOKED CROSS by Sally Carson.

A brilliant, terrifying novel about the rise of Nazism, the falling apart of a country’s codes of decency & the moral fortitude required to oppose persecution. Frighteningly timely. 💙📚

jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2025/11/09/c...
Crooked Cross by Sally Carson
For a novel first published in 1934, Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross feels remarkably timely, charting, as it does, the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s, the falling apart of a country’s fundamental …
jacquiwine.wordpress.com
November 9, 2025 at 7:17 AM
jamesewand.bsky.social
Re-watching tonight at my wife's behest. Suits me!
The poster for Jonathan Glazer's 2004 film Birth, starring Nicole Kidman, who features prominently
November 8, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
steadytiger.bsky.social
As you said, he was upset that there was no script, and here's a bit more on his grievances. Later he says, "I was led like a man in Sing Sing's Death House..." to shoot a big scene which Rosselini suddenly abandoned to go and race his Ferrari against the Naples to Rome express train, which he beat
For years I had been trained in the Hollywood tradition of efficient organization, of wardrobe plots, shooting schedules, and each man in a film crew having a specific task to perform. It came as no small surprise therefore to find that the Rossellini organization consisted simply of the great director himself and a number of assistants whose functions varied day by day. Some of them were sent on errands one day, and the next, given important work to do. A man of impressive appearance would one day be seen with brief case and important-looking papers and documents, and the following day in dungarees repairing the Maestro's skin-diving equipment. When the day came to start shooting in Naples, I was in a state of such bewilderment that I asked Rossellini to release me from the picture, but to this he could not accede because money to back the film had been advanced on the basis of my being in it.
November 8, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Reposted by James Dalrymple
steadytiger.bsky.social
Haven't seen this (yet). Here's a take on that ending from S&S July 2013
ENDINGS JOURNEY TO ITALY An apparently random shotat the end of Rossellini's1953 film encapsulates thedirector's egalitarian vision By Brad Stevens Although Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy (Viaggi in Italia 1953) is now established as one of world cinema's supreme achievements, it still has a surprising number of detractors. I usually advise cinephiles who have trouble getting the films Rossellini made with Ingrid Bergman to list all the thing they perceive as flaws then try to see them as misunderstood virtues Take Bergman's performances, which seem so much clumsier than her Hollywood roles. By stripping away the actress's standard repertoire of gestures and line readings, Rossellini revealed the genuine person usually concealed beneath the mask of technique. It says a great deal about our relationship to cinematic codes that many viewers consider Bergman's acting in these masterpieces to be unrealistic Even the crude dubbing has a positive function, preventing us from experiencing the films as professionally packaged entertainments whose rough edges have been smoothed away. Like the characters who are drifting aimlessly, the actors who were not given screenplays and the director who allowed the film's structure to be determined by chance, we are obliged to enter into an improvisational relationship with the work becoming active participants in the construction of meaning rather than passive consumers Journey in haly focuses on a British couple, Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) and Alex Joyce (George Sanden) visiting Italy to sell some property they have inherited. Their marriage is on the verge of collapse and they have just agreed to divorce when, in the film's sublime final sequence, they find themselves in a town (Maiori) where a religious procession (an actual event into which Romellini inserted his cast and crew) is taking place. Unable to drive through the crowded streets, the Joyces are obliged to leave their cat, that shell which has protected them from to…
November 8, 2025 at 1:06 PM
jamesewand.bsky.social
Clever, unusual little novel, revolving around a character for whom we have no internal focalization, and thus we have to try to grasp through other people's recollections. Is Miss Brodie an inspirational teacher who bucks convention? Or is she a deluded narcissist? ... 1/2
jamesewand.bsky.social James Dalrymple @jamesewand.bsky.social · 9d
Raided my mother-in-law's bookshelves and am now reading:
#booksky 💙📚
The cover of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, featuring Geraldine McEwan (from the Scottish television adaptation)
November 8, 2025 at 12:03 PM
jamesewand.bsky.social
a few thoughts on Jacques Audiard's The Beat that My Heart Skipped, which I enjoyed rewatching (for the first time since its release) a little while back
letterboxd.com/jamesewand/f...
A ★★★★ review of The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)
When I saw Jacques Audiard’s neo-noir at the cinema back in 2005, I had no idea it was a remake of an American crime movie from the ‘70s. It was only a few years ago that I discovered James Toback’s F...
letterboxd.com
November 8, 2025 at 10:42 AM