• Features
  • Festival Reports
  • Book Reviews
  • CTEQ
  • Great Directors
  • Special Dossiers
  • Past Issues
  • Podcast
  • Support us on Patreon
Search
Senses of Cinema logo
  • Dossiers
  • Features
    Random
    • Kansas: Towards a Rhetoric of the 1980s Farm Debt Crisis and the New Depression Film

      Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
      October 2011
      Feature Articles
    Recent
    • Bigger than life, or stranger: Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela: Part II

      Thomas Austin
      May 2022
    • Fire Machines: Titane and the Pyrotechnics of Love

      Emmalea Russo
      May 2022
    • Cringing Violently: Reparative Watching, Phenomenology and Discomfort in Australian Cinema

      Caitlin Wilson
      May 2022
    • Deleuzian Rumblings: Residue by Desire Machine Collective

      Vedant Srinivas
      May 2022
    • Acts of Faith: On Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)

      Peter Verstraten
      May 2022
    • ‘Is The Power of the Dog a New Zealand film? National Identity, Genre and Jane Campion’

      Alfio Leotta & Missy Molloy
      May 2022
  • Interviews
    Random
    • Dreamscapes and Masquerades: A Conversation with Abba Makama

      Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
      October 2019
      Interviews
    Recent
    • Human is only human when vulnerable: An Interview With Michel Franco

      Savina Petkova
      May 2022
    • ‘I Was Taunting the Western’: An Interview with Alejandra Márquez Abella

      Silvia Spitta & Gerd Gemünden
      May 2022
    • “The Act of Filming is an Inner and Physical Journey in Itself”: Interview with Helke Misselwitz

      Victor Paz
      May 2022
    • Information as a music video, comedy as a diagram: Beny Wagner & Sasha Litvintseva in conversation

      Madeleine Collier
      May 2022
    • The Creative Leap to Fluid Consciousness: An Encounter with Ashley McKenzie

      Brigitta Wagner
      May 2022
    • Interview with Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley

      Nolan Kelly
      May 2022
  • Great Directors
    Random
    • Novaro, María

      Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
      December 2002
      Great Directors
    Recent
    • Smith, Jack: Travails of an Underground Artist

      Sanya Osha
      May 2022
    • Desai, Manmohan

      Darragh O’Donoghue
      May 2022
    • Curtiz, Michael

      Jeremy Carr
      January 2022
    • Lau, Kar-leung

      Tom Cunliffe
      January 2022
    • Tahimik, Kidlat 

      Charles Fairbanks
      January 2022
    • Lucas, George

      Dan Golding
      July 2021
  • Great Actors
    Random
    • Lansbury, Angela

      Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
      May 2022
      Great Actors
    Recent
    • Caine, Michael

      Wheeler Winston Dixon
      May 2022
    • Garbo, Greta

      Jeremy Carr
      May 2022
    • Magee, Patrick

      Mark Lager
      May 2022
    • Cage, Nicolas

      Jessica Balanzategui
      January 2022
  • Festival Reports
    Random
    • article placeholder

      St. Kilda Tales: Notes on Fifty Films

      Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
      June 2001
      Festival Reports
    Recent
    • Day by Day: IFFR 2022

      Madeleine Collier
      May 2022
    • Absence and Presence at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. 68.

      Tara Judah
      May 2022
    • Stuck in traffic: IFFR 2022

      Tara Judah
      May 2022
    • From Within the Umbra of History: A Few Things about the Films of Rainer Komers, Sohrab Hura and Sylvia Schedelbauer

      Anuj Malhotra
      May 2022
    • Film Goes On (?): The 23rd Jeonju International Film Festival

      Marc Raymond
      May 2022
    • Play-Doc 2022: António Campos, a secret filmmaker

      Ricardo Vieira Lisboa
      May 2022
  • Book Reviews
    Random
    • Machine-Age Comedy by Michael North

      Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
      June 2011
      Book Reviews
    Recent
    • How to Do Things with Camera Movement: The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera, by Daniel Morgan

      Kyle Barrowman
      May 2022
    • The Depths of Empiricism: Werner Herzog: Ecstatic Truth and Other Useless Conquests, by Kristoffer Hegnsvad

      Tony McKibbin
      January 2022
    • Hollywood, Reinvented: Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, by Glenn Frankel

      Elroy Rosenberg
      January 2022
    • Rhythm and Light: Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz, by Laleen Jayamanne

      Steven Shaviro
      July 2021
    • West Side Story Redux: West Side Story: The Jets, the Sharks, and the Making of a Classic, by Richard Barrios

      Adrian Schober
      July 2021
    • Foraging in a Transforming Mediascape: Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, by Lalitha Gopalan

      Megan Carrigy
      July 2021
  • CTEQ
    Random
    • Ivan the Terrible Parts I and II

      Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
      March 2011
      CTEQ Annotations on Film
    Recent
    • Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949): The Insanity of Romantic Desire

      Wheeler Winston Dixon
      May 2022
    • The Grotesque Loves of Jealousy, Italian Style (Ettore Scola, 1970)

      Tiia Kelly
      May 2022
    • A Geography of Fractured Desire: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962)

      Danica van de Velde
      May 2022
    • Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964)

      Boyd van Hoeij
      May 2022
    • ‘You Can’t Make an Omelette…’ – Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey, 1966) and the Art of Breaking Eggs

      David Melville
      May 2022
    • Fritz Lang’s Spione (1928)

      Shari Kizirian
      May 2022
  • Support Senses
  • About Senses of Cinema
    • Contact Us
    • Staff
    • Thank you to our Patrons
    • Style Guide
  • Latest
  • Past Issues
  • World Poll
  • Podcast
  • Advertisers
  • Proposals
  • Call for Submissions
  • Shop
  • Subscribe
more articles... more articles... more articles... more articles... more articles...

Author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas has published nine books on cult, horror and exploitation cinema with a particular focus on gender politics, including Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and its second edition, published in 2021; Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2014); Suspiria (Auteur/Liverpool University Press, 2015); Ms. 45 (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2017); The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021); and two Bram Stoker Award finalists, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror: 1895-2018 (BearManor Media, 2020). She has co-edited many books including ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and the Thames & Hudson catalogue for the 2018 ACMI exhibition Wonderland about Alice in film. Alexandra is an Adjunct Professor at Deakin University, on the advisory board for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. She was an editor at Senses of Cinema from 2015 to 2018.

“I Wish I Were Here”: Women at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
October 2021
Festival Reports
Locked down as I have been in Melbourne, Australia, and unable to attend the Toronto International Film Festival in person for a second year running, I confess what by any rational standard would be an intensel...

Women at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
October 2020
Festival Reports
In 2016, the 5050x2020 campaign was launched by the Swedish Film Institute at the Cannes Film Festival, and big names were there to share in the announcement including the Swedish Minister for Culture and Democ...

Sharing My Journey: Women and the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
October 2019
Festival Reports
To say that in recent years that broader amorphous beast loosely called “the film industry” has been the centre of often high-profile discourse about gender inequality is an understatement. Beginning in 2017, t...
Roberta Findlay

What’s Inside a Girl?: Porn, Horror and the Films of Roberta Findlay (Issue 80, September 2016)

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
October 2019
Highlights from 20 years of Senses of Cinema
Originally published in Senses of Cinema issue 80, September 2016. “You know the money shots in porn films? Well, this was just a different substance: it was red” – Director Roberta Findlay on the relationshi...

Introduction: The Analogues of Peter Strickland

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and John Edmond
July 2019
The Analogues of Peter Strickland
One way of thinking about Peter Strickland’s works is as baubles of obsession. They are little spheres of influence, spheres of logic that marry fecund dialogue and audiovisual atmosphere with field recordings ...

Outrage (1950): Ida Lupino’s Vision of Rape Trauma

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
October 2018
CTEQ Annotations on Film
In a cultural and industrial landscape significantly altered by the barrage of sexual-abuse and harassment allegations against now-notorious Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in late 2017 that sparked the #Me...

Three Mothers Redux: Kathy Acker, Pina Bausch, Tilda Swinton and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
October 2018
Feature Articles
Amongst the 260 odd pages of Kathy Acker’s 1993 experimental novel My Mother: Demonology, somewhere near the front of that iconic postmodern feminist writer’s book is featured a chapter called “Clit City”. Fram...
Traps (1998)

Comedy and the Castratrice: Věra Chytilová’s Traps (1998)

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
June 2018
CTEQ Annotations on Film
Rape-revenge films directed by women are a rarity, and rape-revenge comedies even rarer; somehow, connecting the two, we find queen of the Czech avant-garde Věra Chytilová and her 1998 film Pasti, pasti, pastič...

Dancing Daze and the Case of the Missing Campion

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
June 2018
Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia
The great misnomer that “everything is online” revealed to me once again how flawed an assumption it is about a year ago when I was thinking through my earliest memories of Australian women filmmakers. I feel I...
Split/Screen Cattet/Forzani

Split/Screen
Cattet/Forzani

John Edmond and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
June 2018
Split/Screen Cattet/Forzani
This dossier coincides with retrospectives of the work of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani at the Melbourne International Film Festival and the Queensland Film Festival in July and August, 2018. This dossier is ...
Let the Corpses Tan

Facial Landscapes: Elina Löwensohn and Let the Corpses Tan (2017)

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
June 2018
Split/Screen Cattet/Forzani
Our planet has provided the most beautiful and ever changing natural landscapes in the form of mountains, oceans, forests and deserts. Human beings remain astonished by these variegated marvels of nature, sculp...

“Sudden Changes in the Weather”: Symptoms (José Ramón Larraz, 1974)

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
March 2018
CTEQ Annotations on Film
Catalan filmmaker José Ramón Larraz’s psychological horror film Symptoms – a UK production – was the British entry at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974. Despite this, the film was considered all but lost for dec...

Established in Melbourne (Australia) in 1999, Senses of Cinema is one of the first online film journals of its kind and has set the standard for professional, high quality film-related content on the Internet.

Senses of Cinema was founded on stolen lands. We acknowledge the sovereignty of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin nation and support all Aboriginal people on their paths to self-determination.

 

© Senses of Cinema 2019

Staff Members

Editors:

César Albarrán-Torres • Amanda Barbour • Tara Judah • Abel Muñoz-Hénonin • Fiona Villella

Contributing Partner

Donate to Senses

 

Click here to make a donation. If you are an Australian resident, any donations over $2 are tax deductible.

 

Search

  • About Senses of Cinema
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy
  • Proposals
  • Advertisers
  • Staff