Normality: The 2022 Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax August 2022 Festival Reports “Back to normal” was undoubtedly the prevailing ethos of this year’s Cannes film festival. This was to be expected after the cancellation of the festival in 2020, with even the powers-that-be at Cannes having t...
Man of Cinema: Jean-Louis Comolli (July 30, 1941–May 19, 2022) Daniel Fairfax July 2022 Obituary Critic, film theorist and filmmaker, Jean-Louis Comolli died in his adoptive home city of Paris on May 19, 2022, at the age of 80. An editor of Cahiers du Cinéma from 1965 to 1973, his international reputation ...
Forms That Think: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard (Introduction) Daniel Fairfax January 2022 Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard On June 9, 1971, Jean-Luc Godard suffered from a sickening traffic accident, with the motorcycle that he used to zip around Paris colliding with a van. He was immediately taken to an intensive care unit, and wi...
“The cinema remains alive when it is diverse”: Interview with Jean-Gabriel Périot Daniel Fairfax January 2022 Interviews Having gained attention on the film festival circuit with his essayistic found-footage retelling of the history of West Germany’s Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in Une jeunesse allemande (A German Youth, 2015, the F...
New Relations Between Forms: Luttes en Italie Daniel Fairfax January 2022 Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard 1. Of all the phases of Godard’s now seven-decade career in the cinema, it is his period of avowedly militantly filmmaking from 1968 to 1972, made when he explicitly identified as a Maoist and subsumed his au...
Brave New World: the 2021 Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax August 2021 Festival Reports How does it feel to return to the cinema? I asked myself this question as my plane taxied on the runway at Nice airport one fine July morning, the shimmering waters of the Mediterranean to my right, the hilly l...
Trade Follows the Film: Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System by Lee Grieveson Daniel Fairfax October 2020 Book Reviews Few recent books in film and media studies can match the ambition Lee Grieveson set himself with Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System, and even fewer have delivered in ...
Founding Father: A Tribute to Thomas Elsaesser (1943–2019) Daniel Fairfax July 2020 Obituary Thomas Elsaesser, a truly titanic figure in film studies, passed away unexpectedly at the age of 76 on December 4, 2019, while on a teaching assignment in Beijing. His death casts a long shadow over the field. ...
The Shining and Us – Participants to the Dossier Reflect on Their First Encounter with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Marta Figlerowicz, Alexander Nemerov, Joy McEntee, Christine Lee Gengaro, Geoffrey Cocks, Ian Christopher, Mick Broderick, Jessica Balanzategui, Nathan Abrams, Valerio Sbravatti, Ilaria Franciotti, Rick Warner, Jeremi Szaniawski, Pip Chodorov, Daniel Fairfax and Filippo Ulivieri July 2020 The Shining at 40
A Stranger in the Hotel: Jean-Pierre Oudart and The Shining Daniel Fairfax July 2020 The Shining at 40 Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) has gained notoriety not only for the sheer quantity of critical analysis it has produced, a voluminous outpouring of exegesis from scholars, critics and fans alike that sho...
The Last Film Festival: the 2020 Berlinale Daniel Fairfax April 2020 Festival Reports I must confess, loyal reader, that there can occasionally be something of a lag between the end of a film festival that I am covering and the moment when I finally transform my scattered thoughts into a legible...
Autumn in a Small Town: The 3rd Pingyao International Film Festival Daniel Fairfax January 2020 Festival Reports It has become a truism, now, to speak of the global proliferation of film festivals in the last few decades. Worldwide, they presently number in the thousands, across all the continents, taking place at all tim...
