Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The 56th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Cerise Howard August 2022 Festival Reports While there was a KVIFF last year (held uncharacteristically in August, from the 20th to the 28th) and a 16-film-strong roaming festival-in-miniature (“KVIFF at Your Cinema”) staged in 2020, I could attend neit...
Of East and West and High and Low: Lemonade Joe (1964) Cerise Howard October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film It’s not news that the 1960s were an extraordinarily fecund time for cinema in Czechoslovakia; the output of the filmmakers connected to the FAMU-centred Czechoslovak New Wave has been celebrated unstintingly, ...
Birds, Orphans and Fools (1969): the Rule of Three in Juraj Jakubisko’s Exemplary Gallows Bacchanalia Cerise Howard July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Jakubisko is kin to Brazil's Glauber Rocha, America's Robert Downey, Mexico's Alejandro Jodorovski, Yuri Ilyenko of the Ukraine, Sergei Paradzhanov of Armenia, Miklós Jancsó of Hungary, and in a way to Poland's...
Of liberation, and of states of undress and redress both: The 54th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Cerise Howard October 2019 Festival Reports Oftentimes reports of mine on the venerable Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) have looked a mite askance at its gender politics. But along comes 2019 and, shut the front door – the 54th KVIFF’s t...
From Saturday to Sunday (Gustav Machatý, 1931), or: Don’t you wonder sometimes ’bout sound and vision? Cerise Howard September 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film The work of Czech director Gustav Machatý (1901–1963) is enjoying a surprise renaissance. The 76th Venice Film Festival had as its pre-opening event a screening of a new digital restoration of Extase (Ecstasy),...
It’s a Cobbler’s Lot: Peter Strickland’s Penchant for Synaesthetic, Švankmajerian Surrealism and Fetishism Cerise Howard July 2019 The Analogues of Peter Strickland "One sensation of mind, one fabric in recollection of touch." - Saleswoman Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed), waxing typically gnomic, in In Fabric (Peter Strickland, 2018). Peter Strickland's latest hyper-styli...
A Time of Reckoning? The 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Cerise Howard October 2018 Festival Reports This year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) was always going to have a lot to address. For Czechs (and Slovaks), 2018 is a year overladen with anniversaries, with two in particular impossible t...
Prefab Story (Věra Chytilová, 1979): Farcical Times at a Prague High-rise Cerise Howard June 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film A common misconception in the West is that Věra Chytilová directed only a few significant, narratively and aesthetically adventurous films, and all in the 1960s – O něčem jiném (Something Different, 1963), 1966...
A Queer Tale of Two Sister Cities, 100 Years and the First FIPRESCI Colloquium Dedicated to Russian Cinema Cerise Howard December 2017 Festival Reports The First FIPRESCI Colloquium Dedicated to Russian Cinema 13-15 November 2017 Lenfilm Studio, St. Petersburg Colloquium website: https://new.culturalforum.ru/event/2017-11-12-pervyj-kollokvium-fipressi-posvy...
Pearls of the Deep, or Five Masterly Apprentices’ Guides to Bohumil Hrabal’s Gift of the Gab Cerise Howard September 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film The 1960s' Czechoslovak New Wave was lightning in a bottle, a glorious film miracle born of an unrepeatable collision of societal and political factors. An extraordinary pool of talented young filmmakers came t...
Of Female Trouble Here, There and Everywhere: The 30th Fribourg International Film Festival Cerise Howard July 2016 Festival Reports Ah, anniversaries. How readily a landmark – and a sense of obligation towards its acknowledgment being given a due sense of occasion – might become more millstone than milestone. And so the challenge presented ...
The Nature of The Beast Remains… Irrepressible! Cerise Howard May 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film Few more controversial figures have enlivened cinema than the Polish polymath Walerian Borowczyk; far fewer still experienced so massive a fall from critical grace. At the epicentre of this fall lay La Bête (Th...
