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...
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov, 1965) Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Directing is fundamentally the truth as it's transformed into images: sorrow, hope, love, beauty. Sometimes I tell others the stories in my screenpla...
Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949): The Insanity of Romantic Desire Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film “There is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” – ...
The Grotesque Loves of Jealousy, Italian Style (Ettore Scola, 1970) Tiia Kelly May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film A florist named Adelaide (Monica Vitti) sits behind a concave glass window, quietly observing something we cannot see. She’s handed a drink by the wea...
A Geography of Fractured Desire: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962) Danica van de Velde May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) opens rather enigmatically with the fatigued denouement of the relationship between the film’s ...
Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) Boyd van Hoeij May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964) was the Italian filmmaker’s first feature in colour. This might seem like a major change ...
‘You Can’t Make an Omelette…’ – Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey, 1966) and the Art of Breaking Eggs David Melville May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film “We must try to be more conspicuous!” - Monica Vitti, Modesty Blaise A typical scene in Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey, 1966) takes place in a hip Am...
Fritz Lang’s Spione (1928) Shari Kizirian May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film It begins like any good spy thriller should, with a fast-paced action-filled set up, here done in a style so clipped and cryptic it leaves us breathle...
An entertainment: Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear (1944) Andréas Giannopoulos May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Graham Greene’s 1943 novel The Ministry of Fear – a “wrong man” story set during the London Blitz in which a recently institutionalised person acciden...
Out of the Shadows: Cloak and Dagger (Fritz Lang, 1946) Ian Olney May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Fritz Lang’s Cloak and Dagger (1946) is a far more interesting film than its middling reputation suggests. A spy story about an American physicist rec...
“A pin for me ’at”: Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941) Adrian Danks May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Man Hunt is the first of a string of four bold anti-Nazi films – along with Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944) and Cloak and Dagger (19...
Fritz Lang in America: While the City Sleeps (1956) Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Fritz Lang’s penultimate American film, While the City Sleeps (1956), is a serial killer drama, much like Lang’s classic film M (1931). Robert Manners...
M (Fritz Lang, 1931) Digby Houghton May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Fritz Lang’s M (1931) is a cry for despair representing the dying moments of a free Germany before the reign of terror was concentrated under Adolf Hi...
The value of reproduction and the reproduction of value: Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010) Anders Furze March 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film “In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in a particular place. It i...
And the road goes on: Fellow Citizen (Abbas Kiarostami, 1983) Jean-Baptiste de Vaulx January 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1983, when the late great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami made his medium-length documentary Fellow Citizen, Iran was still in the throes of its...
A Wedding Suit (Abbas Kiarostami, 1976) Alicia Byrnes January 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Godfrey Cheshire, film critic and author of the volume Conversations with Kiarostami, describes A Wedding Suit as “a gem-like masterpiece that anticip...
Children of the Revolution: Abbas Kiarostami’s First Graders (1984) Adrian Danks January 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Avaliha (First Graders, 1984) is a fascinating transitional work in Abbas Kiarostami’s career. Although it is, in many ways, a precursor to both Khane...
Some Enchanted Evening: Mitchell Lesien and Preston Sturges’ Remember the Night (1940) Adrian Danks January 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Mitchell’s Leisen’s Remember the Night (1940) is most commonly discussed as the last film Preston Sturges wrote before becoming a director. It is ofte...
Unfaithfully Yours (Preston Sturges, 1948) Michael Koller January 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film This essay was originally published in Cteq: Annotations on Film, no. 1 (1996), pp. 18-20, and appears here with a small number of minor changes. A...
Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944) Rick Thompson January 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film This article originally appeared in CTEQ: Annotations on Film, no. 1 (1998), published in Metro, no. 113/114 (1998), p. 131. It is reprinted with the ...
Anthems and Illusions: On a Few Shorts By Apichatpong Weerasethakul Brian Darr June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Imagine that every time you went to the movies you had a chance to see your favorite short film, right after the upcoming attractions trailers and bef...
His Particle, Somewhere: Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012) Duncan Caillard June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Apichatpong’s father died in 2003, and his ashes were spread in the Mekong. During an interview for this year’s Berlinale, for which the director call...
The Strange Beast: Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) Donovan Renn June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film If you're looking for explanations or answers to the mysteries of this beguiling film, the original Thai title might be a clue: Sud pralud. You can he...
Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2002) Thomas Moran June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film What does it mean to sign off a letter with the phrase blissfully yours? What would it mean to translate an afternoon of bliss into a two-hour film? ...
Worldly Desires (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2005) Darragh O’Donoghue June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film A jungle in Thailand at night, filmed in one long shot. There are the murmurs of nature. Lights flash onto a clearing - the spotlights of a film crew....
Not so unknown after all: Jean Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un inconnu (Autobiography of an Unknown) (Edgardo Cozarinsky, 1983) Jytte Holmqvist June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film A film is not the telling of a dream, but a dream in which we all participate together through a kind of hypnosis, and the slightest breakdown in the ...
Uta onna oboegaki (Notes of an Itinerant Performer, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1941) Andrew Brooks April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film The mood of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Uta onna oboegaki (Notes of an Itinerant Performer, 1941) is marked by an image that is unremarkable in its brevity earl...
I Kiss Your Hand, Madame (Robert Land, 1929) Eloise Ross April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film This lightly sophisticated comedy, indulging in its opportunities at the tail-end of two eras – those of silent cinema, and the Weimar Republic’s Gold...
Shimizu Redivivus: Nakinureta haru no onna yo (A Woman Crying in Spring, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933) Joseph Sgammato April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Among the many differences the widely acknowledged dean of Japanese film scholars in the Anglophone world, Donald Richie, likes to point out between W...
Pit Stop: Billy Wilder’s Mauvaise graine (1934) Adrian Danks April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film The low budget, independently-produced Mauvaise graine (1934) is an outlier in Billy Wilder’s career. Although it characteristically illustrates the v...
