Editorial

As is customary for the sensible folks at Senses of Cinema, we begin the new year by looking backwards. Our annual World Poll invites authors and audiences to reflect on their cinematic highlights of the previous year. This year’s zeitgeist thermometer for the world of film catalogues submissions from Australia to Albania, Iran to Indonesia, Spain to Saudi Arabia and beyond. What emerges is a spectrum of what can constitute best practice in terms of filmmaking and film going in 2022.

Guest editors Luise Mörke and Jack Seibert invite audiences to contemplate Computer-Generated Imagery in cinema. Within the past few decades, CGI has become a ubiquitous part of our visual world, from international blockbusters to experimental film, from car commercials to homemade YouTube videos. Their dossier investigates the histories of CGI and considers how the technology renders and shapes the contemporary.

In our features section, Khatuna Maisashvili describes how Georgian cinema has approached the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict. Photographer, filmmaker and author Bruce Jackson makes a nostalgic in depth study of Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973). Indigo Bailey looks at the use of puppetry and interdependency in Leos Carax’s Annette (2021) and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s La double vie de Véronique (1991). Arindam Sen’s After Structural Film: the Conceptual Films of Morgan Fisher contemplates the intersection of Hollywood, Structural film and Conceptual art across the filmmaker’s body of work, following a recent program focus at Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. Laleen Jayamanne looks at the recent Baz Luhrman extravaganza Elvis (2022 )and positions it in the eclectic Australian director’s oeuvre.

Festival reports include; London, Tokyo, Adelaide, Busan, San Sebastián, DOC NYC, Viennale and the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. Dr Sneha Krishnan reports for the first time from Indian Documentary Film Festival Bhubaneshwar, and Glenn D’Cruz reports from Melbourne’s Threshold exhibition, which focuses on works by Dirk de Bruyn, Guy Grabowsky and Mat Hughes.

Brimming with a wide variety of interviewees, this issue’s interviews section profiles the likes of Ann Oren, Yeo Siew Hua, Christophe Honoré, Amy Halpern, Rob Murphy, Mark Jenkin, Cyril Schäublin and Dominik Graf.

We have two long-overdue additions to our Great Directors section: Bob Fosse and Michael Cimino, two essential figures of 1970s American cinema. Although their careers enjoyed wondrous ups and suffered catastrophic downs, both can be remembered as fierce artists and cinematic innovators.

On this occasion two of our book reviews feature filmmakers from Eastern Asia. One, the collective publication Sine ni Lav Diaz, reflects on authorship, form and nationality/globallity regarding Diaz’s work and pursuits. The second is a lengthy study of Hong Sang-soo’s Tale of Cinema by Dennis Lim, part of Decadent Editions provoking monographs. We also started a new enterprise: studying from the distance classics of film theory or criticism. Our goal is to critically think about the legacy of 100, 50 or 25 years old key publications once a year. Our first choice is Christian Metz’s Essais sur la signification au cinéma.

Welcome, to another year of sensitivity and sensations at Senses of Cinema.