The Problem of “America” in Éloge de l’amour Hamish Ford January 2022 Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard The image, no longer just aurally but visually, becomes firstly a question, and secondly, a critique. – Nicole Brenez Godard is too Bazanian to commit himself to the loss of “reality”, which is replaced ...
Formative Portals: Nostalgia for a Slow Burn Cinephilia Hamish Ford June 2018 Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia I fully admit to having trouble with nostalgia – in life, but especially on film. So searing is the “real” version, I find, it has to be at least partially repressed. Nostalgia’s screen portrayal, meanwhile, ne...
1966: Andrei Roublev (Andrei Tarkovsky) Hamish Ford December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic film about Andrei Roublev, Russia’s most famous icon painter, is a remarkable, deeply reflexive examination of the artist’s role in his particular social-historical reality. It is also c...
Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art, by Adrian Martin Hamish Ford July 2016 Book Reviews This is a compact, dense, magisterial book. The scholarly coverage and detailed analysis of select sequences from films, television and new media art, plus extensive commentary on scholarly film criticism and t...
Charting the Web: At the Demonic, Utopian Heart of Rivette’s 1970s Cinema Hamish Ford July 2016 Jacques Rivette Colin: Does that... mean anything to you? Warok: Are you the... the author of this amusing message? Colin: I'm the messenger. Warok: The messenger. I see. You see... I think that this is all a joke... of you...
The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary 1966) Hamish Ford September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, Hungary, 1966) offers an early distillation of the qualities for which Miklós Jancsó soon became an acknowledged master of modernist world cinema. The Hungarian director’s form of...
Hard Clarity, Vaporous Ambiguity: The Fusion of Realism and Modernism in Antonioni’s early 1960s Films [1] Hamish Ford March 2015 Feature Articles Cinema today should be tied to the truth rather than to logic. And the truth of our daily lives is neither mechanical, conventional nor artificial, as stories generally are, and if films are made that way, they...
Shame Hamish Ford March 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film In the late 1960s Ingmar Bergman was not a particularly fashionable figure, despite having made the astonishing and experimental Persona in 1966 (now one of the most respected films of postwar European cinema)....
Two or Three Things I Know About Her Hamish Ford February 2013 CTEQ Annotations on Film Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967) is a very special entry in the remarkable filmography of Jean-Luc Godard, a figure I believe Geoffrey Nowell-Smith is justifi...
Three Crowns of the Sailor Hamish Ford September 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Glorious. That is the word I would use to describe Les trois couronnes du matelot (Three Crowns of the Sailor, 1983), Raúl Ruiz’s French feature from 1983, both in aesthetic construction and its elusive-yet-fam...
Rocco and his Brothers Hamish Ford July 2010 CTEQ Annotations on Film Directed by the unique figure of Luchino Visconti – heir to one of Milan’s richest families, a communist, and gay – Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his Brothers) was one of three huge Italian films released ...
Andrei Roublev Hamish Ford December 2009 CTEQ Annotations on Film Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic film about Andrei Roublev, Russia’s most famous icon painter, is a remarkable, deeply reflexive examination of the artist’s role in his particular social-historical reality. It is also c...