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...
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, ...
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 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...
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 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...