Author Adrian Danks

Most discussion of the career of Cecil Holmes focuses, understandably, on the 30-year body of work he completed after migrating to Australia from New Zealand in 1949. Those who comment on Holmes’ much shorter s...

Man Hunt is the first of a string of four bold anti-Nazi films – along with Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944) and Cloak and Dagger (1946) – that Fritz Lang made between 1941 and 1946. It is also...

Avaliha (First Graders, 1984) is a fascinating transitional work in Abbas Kiarostami’s career. Although it is, in many ways, a precursor to both Khane-ye doust kodjast? (Where is the Friend’s House?, 1987) and ...

Mitchell’s Leisen’s Remember the Night (1940) is most commonly discussed as the last film Preston Sturges wrote before becoming a director. It is often paired with another film directed by Leisen, Hold Back the...

“The time for action is over… The time for reflection begins.” In Margot Nash’s deeply personal essay film The Silences (2015), she mines her own past, memory, history and previous filmmaking practice to tell ...

The low budget, independently-produced Mauvaise graine (1934) is an outlier in Billy Wilder’s career. Although it characteristically illustrates the value and practice of collaboration – it was co-directed by t...

This is an extended and amended version of an article that first appeared in Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand, edited by Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand (Intellect: Bristol and Chicago, 20...

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) was one of the projects closest to Billy Wilder’s heart – an organ that some commentators question even existed. It is also a notoriously vexed and incomplete work, co...

This is an extended and amended version of an article that first appeared in Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand, edited by Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand (Intellect: Bristol and Chicago, 20...

Despite a directorial career in film and television that spread from the mid-1910s to the early 1970s, taking in a series of sustained collaborations with prominent stars (such as Bob Hope and Glenn Ford) and s...

I was interested in the nature of the book, which is actually about failure. And very few things in America seem to me to be about failure, because it’s a society geared to success, and failure is not only kind...

Although Sam Peckinpah’s films are routinely described in terms of their often-fetishistic fascination with violence, influential deployment of such devices as slow motion, split screen and contrapuntal editing...

Although Elia Kazan is most well known for films such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1955) that feature heightened, often hyper-masculine and definitively express...

“City images are historical creations, and are often more resistant to change than the modernisers anticipate, although the resistance may be stronger at some times than others.”- Graeme Davison Stanley Kr...

Come and See (1985 Soviet Union 142 mins) Source: AFTRS Prod, Dir: Elem Klimov Scr: Klimov and Ales Adamovich Phot: Alexei Rodionov Mus: O. Yanchenko, Mozart Cast: Alexei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Ly...

The careers of Raoul Walsh and James Cagney were never quite the same after White Heat (1949). As various commentators have suggested, this propulsive, machine-tooled, sardonically funny and often-brutal crime ...

Barton Fink (1991), the Coen brothers’ fourth feature, represents a departure from their earlier excavations of classical American genre cinema, Blood Simple. (1984) and Miller’s Crossing (1990), as well as the...

An earlier version of this article first appeared in CTEQ: Annotations on Film published in Metro 109 (1997): 49-50. The Night of the Hunter is a film that I am little frightened to write about; scared that th...

Although Robert Altman is now widely regarded as one of the key figures of New Hollywood cinema, he was also a significant director of mainstream US television in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Altman has a re...

In the opening paragraph of their introduction to A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard, Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline situate a particular cinephilic response to the great Swiss filmmaker’s work in terms of where...

Philippe Garrel’s J’entends plus la guitare (1991) is an intimate, unadorned roman à clef quietly but intensely covering an expanse of years in the relationship between Marianne (the extraordinary Johanna ter S...

This is a revised version of an article that first appeared in CTEQ: Annotations on Film published in Metro, no. 199, 1999, pp. 96-97. “For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the w...

This special tribute dossier is devoted to one of the true legends of Australian screen culture, the inimitable and mercurial John Flaus. It marks a little over 60 years since the start of John’s involvement in...

In 1965, Agnès Varda made a short, intense documentary on the then almost 40-year relationship between the French writers Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. Her film predominantly and characteristically focuses upo...

The history of Australian cinema is littered with small-scale, unobtrusive and even intimate portraits of working and middle class life that are largely forgotten in many accounts of what is troubling called Au...

This dossier (the first of a projected series) on contemporary Australian filmmakers focuses on currently active directors who started making audiovisual work in the 1990s or 2000s. Although a number of these f...

At the end of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), Marlene Dietrich’s Tana wearily intones an epitaph for Orson Welles’ Hank Quinlan, a bloated, corrupt cop now floating on the surface of the river: “He was some...

Words for Battle (1941) is the first of Humphrey Jennings’ extraordinary string of wartime documentaries to fully extend the parameters, conventions and patriotic necessities of the form. A fugue of images, sou...

“Swimming”, he told her. “He wants to have a swim.” “Sailing? There’s a race on Saturday.” “I didn’t ask him. I should think he sails. He’s the sort of man who would.” She took a drink of beer. “We could tak...

This is a revised version of an essay that first appeared in a 1997 edition of CTEQ: Annotations on Film. Border Incident (1949) sits within the cycle of “procedural” film noir that came into prominence in t...

Albie Thoms, 1997 (Photo: Peter Mudie) Albie Thoms (1941-2012) was one of the most significant figures of Australian postwar film culture. In a peripatetic career that stretched from his adventurous work wi...

Introduction: Tasmania and the Cinema Van Diemen’s Land (2009) Tasmania’s intermittent relationship with the cinema dates back before the first feature film made on its rugged West Coast in 1925, Louise ...

“Flynn does not deal in depth, but he has a freshness, a galvanizing energy, a cheerful gaiety (in the old sense) made to inspire boys.” (2) “ never fights his material, playing directly into the staleness. He...

For Guillaume-en-Egypte, Polly and Chris This is a slightly revised version of a paper presented at a symposium devoted to Chris Marker in the late 1990s. Each of the speakers was asked to identify and talk ...

The Overlanders is the first of five films made by Ealing Studios in Australia between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s. It provides a fascinating insight into the shifting policies, ideologies and practices of...

The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has showcased the New Iranian Cinema since a special focus in 1993 called “Spotlight Iran”. It has routinely highlighted particular peaks and trends, and has con...