The American indie director Whit Stillman has made only five movies, but if you’re an aspiring cineaste, you need to see them all. Focusing exclusively on young members of the upper crust, Mr. Stillman humanizes a class of people typically derided for belonging to the privileged one percent. Mr. Stillman endears audiences to his heroes [...]
Art, understood as a medium that engages the imagination and desires of its audience, can lure out aspects of its audience that would otherwise be kept hidden. Awareness of what desires the art excites and how one’s imagination is played upon can afford a perceptive viewer an opportunity to gain knowledge both of himself and [...]
Director Whit Stillman understands that America is dominated by a culture that was imported from Europe and is expressed in European tongues and nourished and maintained by contact with Europe… “Amerika, du hast es besser!” Goethe exclaimed. For him America was a land free from the ancient traditions that are Europe’s heritage and curse. For [...]
One way to celebrate the Christmas season and the New Year is to relax with family and friends by coming together around a movie. Here’s a list of suggestions: 1. Rogue One To enjoy this film, you have to go into it realizing that you are not going to see a Star Wars episode. It [...]
We are not born into a savage wilderness but into a beautiful mansion of the Lord that the Lord and those who have gone before us have built. We must avoid neglecting this mansion but rather glorify and preserve it—as we should all of the Lord’s Creation. Whit Stillman, in the novel version of his [...]
Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is a magnificent Jane Austen adaptation, not least because it conceives of the perfect ending for the unpolished project of Austen’s juvenescence, Lady Susan. This is Jane Austen, and it is a comedy, so of course there must be a wedding at the end. But how does one best pull [...]
Because Whit Stillman has adapted Jane Austen’s Lady Susan for his new movie, Love & Friendship, it is worth asking the question: Will most people find that Mr. Stillman has discovered, in this early work of Austen, something new and unfamiliar about her, and made it accessible? The question is prompted by the reports of [...]
Whit Stillman’s new movie, Love & Friendship, is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. Mr. Stillman takes this piece of Austen juvenilia, an epistolary novella, and fleshes it out into a screenplay faithful to the spirit of Austen. Not only that, but also he has reworked Austen’s story into a novel of his own, [...]
We highly recommend this marvelous pilot episode for The Cosmopolitans, a new series by our friend Whit Stillman. Please watch this witty comedy and take the survey at Amazonoriginals.com so that they will support a complete series. Smart, clever, fun and beautiful cinematography. Well done Mr. Stillman! Read Richard Brody’s review in The New Yorker and essays [...]
It is a mistake, I think, to look at Whit Stillman as an apologist for what one of his characters in Metropolitan wanted to call the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, or UHB. Apart from anything else, it is far from clear whether any such thing actually exists in nature in the form proposed by the term’s [...]
The Academy Award nominated filmmaker will offer thematic and cultural commentary in Houston on October 1st. (To register for this event, please click here.) “Whatever Whit Stillman’s politics may be, the very form of his artistic sensibility illuminates what an imaginative conservative cultural intervention in our time might entail… In each of [his] films a note [...]
At the crescendo of his stirring cri de coeur, “Word and Anti-Word: A Christian Humanist Meditation,” Bradley Birzer asks how we might best undertake the renewal, inspired and grounded in the best intellectual traditions of the Christian West, that is so badly needed in our ever-darkening times. For an answer Dr. Birzer turns to Russell [...]
If you’re feeling depressed about the culture around you, Dr. Elliott has a prescription for you: one full dose of Whit Stillman’s most recent film, Damsels in Distress, followed by tap dancing. I am perfectly serious. This charming story unfolds with a group of quirky college girls on the campus of Seven Oaks, a fictitious Ivy [...]
Whit Stillman’s films, which he both writes and directs, are rather Socratic, Christian, and at least ambiguously conservative. For an audience that for the most part possesses none of those qualities, he presents his insight lightly and indirectly. Only occasionally does he allow us to glimpse the extent of his ambition. He told a Psychology [...]