Days (Tsai Ming-liang, 2020) Jacob Agius May 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Rizi (Days, 2020) marked a return to narrative feature filmmaking for Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang after an almost decade long sojourn making vide...
Afflictions of Pain and Desire: The River (Tsai Ming-liang, 1997) Alex Williams May 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film A film crew is assembled at the bank of a river, struggling to make a mannequin look like a real dead body. The figure lies face-down in the grey wate...
The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, 2005) Amelia Leonard May 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Presenting as a bizarre jigsaw puzzle of slow cinema motifs, surrealist musical numbers, a looming climate crisis, and highly explicit sex, Tsai Ming-...
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003) Andrew Le May 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film People our age have the collective experience of moviegoing, but today the experience is different with DVD, satellite, etc. You see these major chang...
The Skywalk is Gone (Tsai Ming-liang, 2002) Digby Houghton May 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Tsai Ming-Liang’s Tian qiao bu jian le (The Skywalk is Gone, 2002; Skywalk from here on) is a short film bridging his previous and subsequent features...
What Time is it There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001) Jessica Balanzategui May 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film The turn of the 21st century in Taiwan was marked, as in most countries, by intense fears of the “millennium bug”. This “Y2K” bug would supposedly lea...
The Cost of Living: Bill Mousoulis’ Lovesick (2002) Jake Wilson May 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film “If a viewer understands the story and characters fully, then I have failed.” – Bill Mousoulis on Lovesick Those were the days, when you could h...
A Poetic Kind of Realism: Bill Mousoulis’ Dreams Never End (1983) Fiona Villella May 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film In a career that spans more than 40 years and includes over 100 films, Dreams Never End was made by Bill Mousoulis just two years into his life as a f...
“Stick around. You make it all so nice and sad”: Fatalism and Fantasy in Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949) Alexia Kannas April 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949) stands as one of the most bleakly romantic and fatalistic films noir of the classical era. In it, Burt Lancaster p...
“In his element”: Burt Lancaster and The Train (John Frankenheimer, 1964) Djoymi Baker April 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Train (John Frankenheimer, 1964) is based on the memoir of Rose Valland, Le front de l’art: Défenses des collection Françaises, 1939-1945, in whic...
No Sex Life in the Grave: Conversation Piece (Luchino Visconti, 1974) or Gruppo di famiglia in un interno David Melville April 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film But thou, dear, hide my body with thy veil, And with thy raiment cover foot and head… And now for God’s sake kiss me once and twice And let me go; ...
“I used to believe in things”: On Frank and Eleanor Perry’s The Swimmer (1968) Eloise Ross April 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film My films are actors’ films, films of human relationships. I never think, “How can I dazzle the audience with my camera?” I want to dazzle them with th...
“Match me, Sidney”: Burt Lancaster and the Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957) Adrian Danks April 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Sweet Smell of Success (1957) is a landmark in the careers of actors Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, screenwriter Clifford Odets, and director Alexand...
The Grey Fox and the Platinum Blonde: Marilyn Monroe in Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business (1952) Andréas Giannopoulos April 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film “She’s as phony as a three dollar bill, and you’re trying to make her real”, director Howard Hawks told 20th Century-Fox executive Darryl F. Zanuck af...
Always an Angel, Never a God: Marilyn Monroe and Self-Determination in Bus Stop Claire White April 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film The first time you see Marilyn Monroe as Chérie, the hillbilly chanteuse, she is sitting in a window having a quiet moment to herself. With her leg co...
“We’re All Dying”: The Misfits as Haunted Film Ivana Brehas April 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film What’s recorded by the camera is at least metaphorically, a ghost of something that was once as it appears in the picture but is no more. And so that...
Cyclo (Tran Anh Hung, 1995) Andrew Le April 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film When describing the emotion he puts into his work, director Trần Anh Hùng states that he wants audiences to be able to understand his overall life per...
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959) Emma Fajgenbaum March 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Robert Bresson described Pickpocket (1959), his fifth feature, as an “impatient film”. It took him only three months to outline a treatment, six weeks...
I Remember: Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973) Jacob Agius February 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Often cited as Federico Fellini’s most autobiographical film and the last of his greats, Amarcord (1973) can also be seen as one of the most autobiogr...
The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczyńska, 2015) Faith Everard December 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Seven jellyfishes, eight jellybabies, Wanna drown in the water and stay dead for ages. Nine jellyfishes, ten jellyfishes, Give me a boyfriend who isn’...
Othering Heights: The Queerest of the Queer in Rosa von Praunheim’s City of Lost Souls (1983) Cerise Howard December 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Prolific activist-filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim was born Holger Radtke in Nazi-occupied Latvia in 1942. He rebranded himself “Rosa”, to serve as a cons...
To walk away, you gotta leave something behind, or a long story short: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) Cerise Howard December 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film For all that it contains resonances of queer musical elders – The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), the Sandra Bernhard vehicle Without Y...
Lost Paradise: F.W. Murnau’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) Andréas Giannopoulos November 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film By the end of the 1920s the success of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) had made F. W. Murnau a significantly wealthy and commanding figure in Hol...
Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, F.W. Murnau, 1922) Martyn Bamber November 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film 2022 marks 100 years since the release of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (hereafter referred to...
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927) Jacob Agius October 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film What can one say that hasn’t already been said about F.W. Murnau’s lyrical masterpiece, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). The film marks the Germa...
Die Finanzen des Großherzogs (The Grand Duke’s Finances, F.W. Murnau, 1924) Jonathan Mackris October 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film The critic Chris Fujiwara once described Nicholas Ray’s Wind Across the Everglades (1958) as a “litmus test” of the auteur theory. Fujiwara intended t...
A Dream of Light and Dark – F.W. Murnau and Faust David Melville October 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film In the age of cinema the Faustian myth became a play of darkness and light, and this play indeed replaced all the words from Marlowe up to Goethe. ...
American Maverick: How Joan Micklin Silver Made Hester Street (1975) Shari Kizirian October 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film After writing and directing several shorts and selling a script about the wives of soldiers missing in action during the Vietnam War (what became Mark...
“There’s meaning in a cup of tea”: Cecil Holmes’ Weekly Review no. 374: The Coaster (1948) Adrian Danks October 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Most discussion of the career of Cecil Holmes focuses, understandably, on the 30-year body of work he completed after migrating to Australia from New ...
Sitting on a Branch, Enjoying Myself (Sedím na konári a je mi dobre, Juraj Jakubisko, 1989) Darragh O’Donoghue October 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1968, Juraj Jakubisko, a graduate of Prague’s legendary FAMU film academy and recent employee of the Laterna Magika theatre, presented his adaptati...
Gazing at the Gaze: Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) Anders Furze September 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Music plays a central role in Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, 2019), director Céline Sciamma’s masterful 2019 queer per...
Ma Vie de Courgette (My Life as a Courgette, Claude Barras, 2016) Cristina Johnston September 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Much recent critical literature on cinematic representations of childhood explores the ways in which contemporary cinema bears witness to “a new recog...
Les Olympiades (Paris, 13th District, Jacques Audiard, 2021) Darragh O’Donoghue September 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Jacques Audiard’s Les Olympiades (2021) is adapted from three stories by beloved Californian comics artist and illustrator Adrian Tomine. At every po...
Girlhood (Céline Sciamma, 2014) Holly Willis September 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film You might think of French writer-director Céline Sciamma’s remarkable 2014 film Girlhood as a portrait, one that captures the likeness of a girl, not ...
Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) Louise Cain September 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film The tonalities and textures of our childhood homes stay with us, buried deep within our consciousness: we remember the number of steps in a hallway, t...
Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011) Faith Everard September 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film “I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide” - Emily Brontë, Stanzas When the word “tomboy” first came i...
