Of What is Merata Mita/Mauri the Name? Simon Sigley July 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Mauri (1988) is the only feature-length fiction film that Merata Mita (1942–2010) made across her decades-long engagement with audio-visual narrative....
In Dreams: Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (2017) Adrian Danks July 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Coming almost 30 years after Ildikó Enyedi’s extraordinary breakthrough feature, Az én XX. századom (My Twentieth Century, 1989), and 18 years since h...
The Last Musical Show: Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975) Dana Polan June 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Throughout the New Hollywood of the late 1960s into the 1970s, two filmmaking desires of auteur directors (usually male) sometimes combined: to realis...
The Mysterious Authenticity of Peter Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack (1979) Ben Slater June 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film There’s a scene in Saint Jack (Peter Bogdanovich, 1979) when Jack Flowers, played with charm and grace by Ben Gazzara, returns to the Singapore Chinat...
“Don’t you know the meaning of propriety?”: Screwball Comedy and Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? (1972) Eloise Ross June 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Watch the trailer for What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and you are likely to learn quite a lot about the director, Peter Bogdanovich, and the era that the film ...
“Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used To Do)?”: Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) Adrian Danks June 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film It begins and ends outside the movies. Peter Bogdanovich’s sophomore feature, The Last Picture Show (1971), is a clear-eyed portrait of a small North ...
“Is that what I was afraid of?” New and Old Fears in Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968) Jacob Agius June 2023 CTEQ Annotations on Film Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature, Targets (1968), is a left-of-centre horror film that initially seems to stand out as an anomaly within his filmogra...
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...
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. ...
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...
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 ...
