Russian Soul, Eurotrance: Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids edited by Giovanni Chiaramonte and Andrei A. Tarkovsky Benjamin Halligan February 2005 Book Reviews If only because of the softness of the image, and that unavoidably yellowy-brown colour palette characteristic of Polaroid snaps, these photographs could not deserve recognition on their own merits. But as arte...
Against Cinephiliphobia: Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin Benjamin Halligan July 2004 Book Reviews The disappointment of Peter Cowie's recent Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the '60s (1) is in the failure of the book to capture the evolving as-it-happens aspect of his four-decades-worth of the I...
Leeds International Film Festival, 2003 Benjamin Halligan December 2003 Festival Reports The 11 days of the 17th Leeds International Film Festival delivered a diverse and challenging programme. Leeds has always been adventurous and iconoclastic: the 2002 program included Miklós Jancsó films and...
Visconti Revisited Take 2: Luchino Visconti by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith Benjamin Halligan July 2003 Book Reviews (Third edition, London: BFI, 2003) The received wisdom on Luchino Visconti involves citing his apparently contradictory nature as the basis for the uniqueness of his work. He, and it, embodies the seemingly ...
The Remaining Second World: Sokurov and Russian Ark Benjamin Halligan March 2003 Film in the Eye of History Halligan's rich discussion of Sokurov's Russian Ark weaves together analyses of history, politics and art.
The Felliniesque Besieged: Fellini Lexicon by Sam Rohdie Benjamin Halligan January 2003 Book Reviews (London: BFI Publications, 2002) “I first met your name in the Pasquino cinema in Rome. In Trastevere. They show films in English there. You had written the sceneggiatura for a film I saw that I liked. An Angl...
On the Interval between Reality and Unreality Benjamin Halligan November 2001 Terror, Disaster, Cinema and Reality - A Symposium As a counterpoint to Slavoj Žižek's interpretation of September 11th – the World Trade Centre Twin Towers as symbols of “virtual capitalism” and “the stark separation between the digitised First World and the T...
Notes on Negative Space Benjamin Halligan February 2001 CTEQ Annotations on Film Negative Space (1999 UK 39 mins) Source: CAC/NLA Prod Co: Illuminations Television Prod: Keith Griffiths Dir, Scr, Ph: Chris Petit Ed: Emma Matthews Mus: Tracks by Don Covay, Bob Dylan, Lee 'Scratch' Per...
WR: Mysteries of the Organism by Raymond Durgnat Benjamin Halligan December 2000 Book Reviews (BFI London 1999) An early book by Raymond Durgnat - a monograph published in 1963 by Motion Publications (London) - was called Nouvelle Vague: the first decade. Whatever Nouvelle Vague activity was going on...
