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 ...
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
Founding Father: A Tribute to Thomas Elsaesser (1943–2019) Daniel Fairfax July 2020 Feature Articles 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. ...
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...
Introduction: Communist Utopians: The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet Daniel Fairfax October 2019 Communist Utopians: The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet The filmmaking couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet were fond of describing their film Der Tod des Empedokles (The Death of Empedocles, 1986) as a “communist utopia”. Evidently, it was the Hölderlin tex...
Straub/Huillet’s Ecological Communism Daniel Fairfax October 2019 Communist Utopians: The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet In the years following Danièle Huillet’s death, Jean-Marie Straub was something of a fixture in the Parisian repertory cinema scene. As retrospective programmes of the couple’s work played across the city, he w...
The Audio-Spectator: An Interview with Michel Chion (Issue 84, September 2017) Daniel Fairfax October 2019 Highlights from 20 years of Senses of Cinema Originally published in Senses of Cinema issue 84, September 2017. One of the world’s foremost theorists of sound in the cinema, former Cahiers du cinéma critic Michel Chion is also a composer of musique con...
Slow History: Cinema and Culture in the 2010s Daniel Fairfax October 2019 This is what defined cinema in the 2010s In his recent book, Clear Bright Future, the British political theorist Paul Mason admits to having recently experienced a moment of uncanny bewilderment. Walking down a UK high street, he was struck by the see...
Political Gestures: Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, by Nico Baumbach Daniel Fairfax July 2019 Book Reviews There is a slight retro effect to the triple-barreled title of Nico Baumbach’s book, with the pair of solidi separating-conjoining the terms “cinema”, “politics” and “philosophy”. Is the writer not harking back...
Children of the Apocalypse: the 2019 Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax July 2019 Festival Reports Picture this, dear reader: from the very beginning of this year’s Cannes film festival, I had been having nightmares about the prospect of getting into the inaugural press screening of Quentin Tarantino’s Once ...