an online journal devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema

Look Both Ways
Surrealist documentary
Network
Robert Towne
Muriel: The Time of Return
The Leopard

Australian Film

Look Both Ways: Interview with Sarah Watt and Andrew S. Gilbert by Jonathan Dawson
After the dire predictions of a crisis in the Australian cinema, a flurry of recent releases has raised the profile of local films, not least of which being Watt's début feature.

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Reality Seen Awry

Surrealist Documentary: Reviewing the Real by Bruce Hodsdon
Famously, L'Âge d'or opens with a documentary on scorpions. The film was first screened publicly in Paris in November 1930. In honour of its 75th anniversary year, this article provides a critical overview of Surrealist uses and abuses of the documentary form.

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American Cinema: The 1970s

On the Decline of the New Hollywood and the Prescience of Network by Greg Ng
Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay for Sidney Lumet's 1976 film foresaw much of what the current tele-visual cultural landscape would look like decades before it arrived at our doorstep.

Out of the Blue: Re-evaluating Electra-Glide in Blue by Bill Blick
One of the more forgotten movies of the 70s receives due appreciation.

Citizen Bickle, or the Allusive Taxi Driver: Uses of Intertextuality by John Thurman
This seminal film of the 1970s is explored as a force-field of references to film style, from Bresson to Godard, Rosi, Hitchcock, Ford, et al.

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Spotlight on Screenwriter Robert Towne

The Edge of Melancholy: Shampoo by Elaine Lennon

A Question of Authorship: The Yakuza by Elaine Lennon
American cinema of the 1970s would look decidedly different without the contribution of Towne's screenplays. Arguably, it is the decade in which he did his best work, with films such as Chinatown, The Last Detail and countless others, both credited and uncredited. Lennon provides two detailed examinations of his work.

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European Cinema Revisited

Jacques Tati: Last Bastion of Innocence by Pedro Blas Gonzalez
An astute philosophical reflection on Tati's sublime films.

Muriel: The Time of Return by Crissa-Jean Chappell
The themes of time and memory haunt Alain Resnais' cinema, no less so than in this gem of early-60s modernist narrative.

Speaking For Others: Manifest and Latent Content in In a Year with Thirteen Moons by Justin Vicari
An insightful analysis of the complex interweaving of the personal and the political in one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most emotionally torturous of films.

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Features

Thinking of Cluny Brown by Ray Davis
“Squirrels to the nuts”. This great 1946 Ernst Lubitsch classic is elegantly pondered on.

John Ford's The Horse Soldiers by James Hawco
Notations on Ford's view of Civil War divisions in one of his late cavalry westerns.

Lacrimae Rerum Materialized by Tag Gallagher
An exploration of the Straubs' majestic œuvre, countering much of the received dogma that has surrounded perception of their work.

The Incompossible Language of Natural Aristocracy: Deleuze's Misreading of Visconti's The Leopard by Lucio Angelo Privitello
A theoretical counter-argument to Delueze's idea of the 'time-image' as addressed to this seminal film on Italian history.

Mike Leigh, Topsy-Turvy and the Excavation of Memory by Wheeler Winston Dixon
At first glance Topsy-Turvy may seem an atypical Leigh film, but Dixon argues that it is “a radical work masquerading as a conventional biopic.”

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Canadian Cinema

Blaine Allan Interviewed by Noel King
This acclaimed critic and writer discusses a range of issues related to Canadian film culture and its regional cinemas.

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Festival Reports

Book Reviews

Also new this issue

5 profiles have been added to the Great Directors critical database:
Alan Clarke • Yilmaz Güney • Joris Ivens • Mitchell Leisen • James Whale

19 annotations have been added to the Cinémathèque Annotations on Film section:
Baby Face • The Bitter Tea of General Yen • British Sounds •
La Chinoise, ou plutôt à la chinoise: un film en train de se faire • Les Cousins • Forbidden • Forty Guns • House by the River • The Letter • No Man of Her Own • Parsifal • Porky Pig's Feat • Porky's Duck Hunt • Rabbit Punch
and Rabbit Hood • Sorry, Wrong Number • Summer Storm • There's Always Tomorrow • Voyage to the Beginning of the World • Wackiki Wabbit

14 new lists have been added to the Top Tens section.

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