Stairways to Paradise: Youssef Chahine and Alexandria…Why? David Melville October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film I’ll build a stairway to paradise With a new step every day. I’m going to get there at any price. Stand aside, I’m on my way! - Georges Guétary, A...
At Home Among Strangers (Свой среди чужих, чужой среди своих, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1974) Darragh O’Donoghue October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film At first it looks like we’re in for a Soviet Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. A group of Red Army soldiers and a young woman on a farm celebrate th...
German Yearnings, East and West: The Sons of Great Bear (Josef Mach, 1966) Donovan Renn October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Right out of the gate, Die Söhne der großen Bärin (The Sons of Great Bear) is confrontational, startling, and something else we can't quite describe. ...
Waiting for Rain: Oppression and Resistance in Youssef Chahine’s The Land (1970) David Heslin October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Al-ard (The Land, Youssef Chahine, 1970) begins and ends in the dirt. In its opening sequence, a hand is seen patting the soil around a young cotton p...
Of East and West and High and Low: Lemonade Joe (1964) Cerise Howard October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film It’s not news that the 1960s were an extraordinarily fecund time for cinema in Czechoslovakia; the output of the filmmakers connected to the FAMU-cent...
A Man from the Boulevard des Capucines (Chelovek s bulvara Kaputsinov, Alla Surikova, 1987) Martyn Bamber October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film While the Western is primarily known as an American cinematic institution, this has not stopped other countries from enthusiastically embracing the ge...
Cairo Station (باب الحديد, 1958) Darragh O’Donoghue October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Qinawi, the anti-hero of Youssef Chahine’s international breakthrough, is introduced into the main narrative by indirection. First, the ‘lame’ newspap...
Abbas Kiarostami’s The Traveller (1974) Grant Bromley October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1959, François Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) presented delinquent childhood in a manner that allowed for its lead actor, ...
“An Artist Always Paints His Own Portrait”: Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960) Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1959, just four years before his death from a heart attack, Jean Cocteau knew that his time was running out after years of ill health, opium addict...
Les Enfants Terribles (Jean-Pierre Meville, 1950) Martyn Bamber July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Writing about Les Enfants Terribles in mid-2020 during a global pandemic, it is tempting to draw parallels between the seclusion of real-world citizen...
Between Dreams and Death: Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950) Danica van de Velde July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In Greek mythology, Orpheus is a talented musician who travels to the underworld to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice. Upon entering the realm of the...
Family Matters: Les Parents terribles (Jean Cocteau, 1948) Donovan Renn July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Les Parents terribles begins with hand-drawn animation of a theatre curtain rising to reveal not a stage, or even a wide shot, but a jarring close-up ...
