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    • Phantoms Came to Meet: Guy Maddin’s Seances as Surrealist History of Cinema

      Joanna Di Mattia
      December 2017
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    • Criminals Against Decoration: Modernism as a Heist

      Andy Reischling
      October 2020
    • The New-Ark: trying to disavow anti-blackness

      Andrew Brooks
      October 2020
    • Claustrophobia and Intimacy in Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth and Her Smell

      Zoë Almeida Goodall
      October 2020
    • Wanda (Barbara Loden,1971)

      What’s in a Cone? Barbara Loden’s Wanda Between Weakness and Resilience

      Luise Moerke
      October 2020
    • Come and See The Painted Bird: A Filmmaker’s Plea

      Salvador Carrasco
      October 2020
    • Thresholds of Work and Non-Work in Tulapop Saenjaroen’s People on Sunday

      Steffanie Ling
      October 2020
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      Joanna Di Mattia
      April 2010
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      Sucheta Chakraborty
      January 2021
    • Ghost Cities: The 58th Viennale

      Leonardo Goi
      January 2021
    • Queer and Australian Features at the 2020 Adelaide Film Festival

      Stuart Richards
      January 2021
    • Korean Cinema’s Self-Portrait: The 25th Busan International Film Festival

      Marc Raymond
      January 2021
    • Live Through This: The 2020 Adelaide Film Festival

      Saige Walton
      January 2021
    • “Sense of Place”: The 33rd Tokyo International Film Festival

      Kohei Usuda
      January 2021
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    • The Shadowcatchers: A History of Cinematography in Australia by Martha Ansara

      Joanna Di Mattia
      September 2012
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    • Revising a Concept: Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia, by Jonathan Walley

      Holly Willis
      January 2021
    • When Everything Seemed Possible: London’s Arts Labs and the 60s Avant-Garde by David Curtis

      Wheeler Winston Dixon
      January 2021
    • “Memories Are Made of This”: Juliane Lorenz and Lothar Schirmer’s R.W. Fassbinder: Film Stills, 1966-1982

      Eric Gudas
      January 2021
    • Beneath the Tuxedo Elegance: Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend, by Mark Glancy

      Tom Ryan
      January 2021
    • Anarchist Cinema: A Dream of Resistance: The Cinema of Kobayashi Masaki by Stephen Prince

      Karthick Ram Manoharan
      January 2021
    • Trade Follows the Film: Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System by Lee Grieveson

      Daniel Fairfax
      October 2020
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      The Matroyshka Doll of Laughter and Uncertainty: Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada (2016)

      Joanna Di Mattia
      September 2017
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    • Stairways to Paradise: Youssef Chahine and Alexandria…Why?

      David Melville
      October 2020
    • At Home Among Strangers (Свой среди чужих, чужой среди своих, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1974)

      Darragh O’Donoghue
      October 2020
    • German Yearnings, East and West: The Sons of Great Bear (Josef Mach, 1966)

      Donovan Renn
      October 2020
    • Waiting for Rain: Oppression and Resistance in Youssef Chahine’s The Land (1970)

      David Heslin
      October 2020
    • Of East and West and High and Low: Lemonade Joe (1964)

      Cerise Howard
      October 2020
    • A Man from the Boulevard des Capucines (Chelovek s bulvara Kaputsinov, Alla Surikova, 1987)

      Martyn Bamber
      October 2020
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      Joanna Di Mattia
      February 2005
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      Jeremy Carr
      October 2020
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      Brendan Black
      October 2020
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      Adrian Schober
      April 2020
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      Abel Muñoz Hénonin
      April 2020
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      Jasper Mäkinen
      October 2019
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      Bruce Jackson
      July 2019
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Author Joanna Di Mattia

Joanna Di Mattia

Joanna Di Mattia is a writer and film critic and the inaugural winner of the Senses of Cinema-Monash University Essay Prize. Her PhD in Women’s Studies from Monash University examined anxiety about masculinity in contemporary American cinema. She has contributed to numerous publications and her writing reflects her interest in the aesthetics of desire, screen acting, and the complex pleasures of looking.

Far From the Sea in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Joanna Di Mattia
October 2020
Pop Music in Film
Do secret agents have hearts that break? In its final minutes, Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), delivers an affirmative answer with a pop song – a musical moment discordant with the film’s mo...

Intimate Interiors: The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992)

Joanna Di Mattia
October 2019
CTEQ Annotations on Film
The Long Day Closes (1992), like each of Terence Davies’ nine films, lives and breathes within interior spaces. When Bud (Leigh McCormack), the film’s 12-year-old protagonist, is pictured outdoors, it is an exp...
Terence Davies

Great Directors: Terence Davies (Issue 84, September 2017)

Joanna Di Mattia
October 2019
Highlights from 20 years of Senses of Cinema
Originally published in Senses of Cinema issue 84, September 2017. “Only Through Time Time is Conquered” Early in Of Time and the City (2008), Terence Davies’ documentary collage that brings the postwar Live...

“A Happy Sense of Solitude”: Exterior Space in The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (Yasujirō Ozu, 1952)

Joanna Di Mattia
March 2019
CTEQ Annotations on Film
The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1952) appears early in the most lauded period of Yasujirō Ozu’s 35-year career. Inevitably overshadowed by the film that followed it, Tokyo Story (1953), The Flavour of Green...

A Man Under Investigation: The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, 1953)

Joanna Di Mattia
October 2018
CTEQ Annotations on Film
“Harry Graham …” the adoption agent, Mr Jordan (Edmund Gwenn), contemplates, once the man in question (Edmond O’Brien) and his wife, Eve (Joan Fontaine), have left his office. Harry and Eve have decided to adop...

An Unsentimental Education: Children in the Films of Jacques Doillon

Joanna Di Mattia
October 2018
The Second Generation: French Cinema After the New Wave
An adult tries to comfort the four-year-old girl whose grief and confusion at her mother’s sudden death provides Jacques Doillon’s Ponette (1996) with its narrative and emotional contours. She tells Ponette (Vi...

Thinking about Celine and Jesse: Travelling through time with The Before Trilogy

Joanna Di Mattia
June 2018
Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia
* The last time I saw France, I caught a train alone from Paris to Lyon. I ate a ham and cheese baguette, drank a bottle of Orangina, and flicked absently between magazines, writing in my journal, and reading ...

Some thoughts on the erotic aesthetic in Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Desire Trilogy’

Joanna Di Mattia
March 2018
Feature Articles
Desire is a wish; a risk; a hunger. Desire starts with an arousal that then becomes a yearning. It alters our perception and changes our molecules. To follow where desire leads can make life better or messier, ...
A Place in the Sun

Inside the outsider’s skin: Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951)

Joanna Di Mattia
March 2018
CTEQ Annotations on Film
George Stevens helmed a U.S. Army film unit for much of the Second World War. He recorded the D-Day landings, the liberation of Paris and, most importantly, the liberation of Dachau concentration camp and Duben...
Alice in Wonderland

Alice on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Norman Z. McLeod’s Alice in Wonderland (1933)

Joanna Di Mattia
March 2018
Alice in Wonderland
‘Will I ever get into the beautiful garden?’ Charlotte Henry’s Alice cries in frustration after she takes a drink from a bottle (‘Not poison’) that she hopes will let her fit through a very small door. Her deci...
The 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival

Faces, Places: The 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival

Joanna Di Mattia
September 2017
Festival Reports
“We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.” This statement, from Billy Wilder’s Hollywood noir, Sunset Boulevard (1950), returned to me time and time again during the 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival. A ...
The Piano

The Heart Asks Pleasure First: Economies of Touch and Desire in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993)

Joanna Di Mattia
September 2017
CTEQ Annotations on Film
Touch creates its own language. In The Piano (1993), Jane Campion’s gorgeous, Gothic romance, it speaks multiple dialects. Campion gives us access to mute Ada McGrath’s (Holly Hunter) voice when her fingers tou...

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© Senses of Cinema 2019

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Michelle Carey • Daniel Fairfax • Fiona Villella • César Albarrán-Torres

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