Author Danica van de Velde

The prologue of Hamaguchi Ryūsuke’s Nete mo samete mo (Asako I & II, 2018) is imbued with the adrenaline-inducing intoxication of love at first sight – what Roland Barthes describes “as the very sign of sud...

During an interview discussing first world and third world cinemas, filmmaker and scholar Hamid Naficy asked Filipino auteur Lino Brocka about the genre of films that had the biggest impact on him. Brocka refer...

Following a three-minute opening sequence that is completely devoid of dialogue, the first words uttered in Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman’s Yadon ilaheyya (Divine Intervention, 2002) are “What a fucked-up...

Painted in 1855, Ford Madox Brown’s artwork The Last of England captures a boat scene that was inspired by the emigration to Australia of sculptor Thomas Woolner in 1852. With the White Cliffs of Dover in the b...

In his influential 1966 new wave film Masculin féminin (Masculine Feminine), Jean-Luc Godard defined a generation of French adolescents as “the children of Marx and Coca Cola.” Capturing the tension between the...

In 1976, Czech writer and scholar Antonín Jaroslav Liehm wrote a scathing appraisal of the current state of Czechoslovak cinema entitled “Triumph of the Untalented”. Juxtaposing the “fresh look at the world” of...

Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) opens rather enigmatically with the fatigued denouement of the relationship between the film’s central protagonist, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), and her former...

A prolific filmmaker who reportedly directed over 150 films between 1924 and 1959, Hiroshi Shimizu has arguably received only a fraction of the critical and popular attention lavished upon his contemporaries. S...

In Greek mythology, Orpheus is a talented musician who travels to the underworld to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice. Upon entering the realm of the undead, the mournful music that Orpheus sings and plucks fr...

In a 1968 interview with Cahiers du cinéma, former Cahiers editor-in-chief and filmmaker Jacques Rivette made the provocative comment that “the cinema is necessarily fascination and rape, that is how it acts on...

Terence Davies’ Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion (2016) opens with Miss Lyon (Sara Vertongen), the headmistress of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, grimly reciting the options available to the seminary’s st...

Originally published in Senses of Cinema issue 88, October 2018. Towards the end of Marguerite Duras’ 1969 film Détruire dit-elle (Destroy, She Said) – adapted from her novel of the same name published earli...

Elaine May opens her second feature film, The Heartbreak Kid (1972), by compressing the full cycle of courtship into three minutes. From the film’s smarmy protagonist, Lenny (Charles Grodin), rehearsing his sed...

A man’s hat left forgotten on a wall hook in a laneway izakaya; a bottle of whisky lit by lamplight on a desk piled with mountains of books; a plume of steam rising from the spout of a metal teapot; the consist...

Towards the end of Sergio Leone’s opening sequence in Once upon a Time in America (1984), the film’s protagonist, David “Noodles” Aaronson (Robert De Niro), flees to a bus station where he buys a one-way ticket...

Towards the end of Marguerite Duras’ 1969 film Détruire dit-elle (Destroy, She Said) – adapted from her novel of the same name published earlier that year – a conversation between two of the characters takes on...

Met with an overwhelming number of lukewarm reviews upon its original cinematic release, and consistently relegated to little more than a footnote in the history of the spaghetti western genre, Giulio Petroni’s...

Arguably one of the most enduring images in the cinema of François Truffaut is the freeze frame that concludes his first feature-length film, Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959). Following an escape fr...

From the opening moments of Harun Farocki’s Stilleben (Still Life, 1997), the viewer is charged with not merely unconsciously accepting what is placed in their line of vision, but actively interrogating each im...