This is an essential book on one of the most explosive film movements in recent memory, rivalling the prodigious output of Iranian films in the 1990s; the Nigerian feature film industry, which, working almost entirely in video (both digital and analogue) has racked up an astounding 9,000 full-length feature productions between 1992 and 2007. In [...]
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Joram ten Brink’s interest in French Ethnographer-Cinéaste Jean Rouch’s (1918-2004) work “resurfaced” after the latter’s death in Africa. In October 2004, he organised the highly successful conference Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch at London’s Institut Français. The conference attempted to remedy the Anglophone world’s unawareness of Rouch by juxtaposing and interfacing past and [...]
Published in conjunction with a retrospective of David Rimmer’s films and videos at Vancouver’s Pacific Cinémathèque, Loop, Print, Fade + Flicker: David Rimmer’s Moving Images is the first in a proposed series of monographs devoted to “the wide range of film-, video- and media-makers that have made significant contributions to either defining, expanding or subverting [...]
I was intrigued when I spotted the flyer for A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film, as I had just been to a talk by Irigaray at the ICA, London, and had been struck, on this occasion, by how her notion of intersubjective exchange could be conducive to film spectatorship. Other than the essays, [...]
The name Disney signifies different things to different people. For many, Disney animation would have been a source of wonderment as a child; and for every wide-eyed child there will be at least one parent charged with sustaining this enchantment with hard-earned pixie-dust. Through its acquisition and collaboration with Pixar, Disney is not only synonymous [...]
The relationship of cinema to politics has a rich and chequered history, effectively dictating the form of many of cinema’s most vibrant configurations (Russian cinema in the wake of the 1917 revolution, Italian neorealism after the Second World War…). The real stakes of the affair however were perhaps most clearly spelt out in France in [...]
Most standard histories of the Hollywood motion picture industry date the rise of powerful talent agencies to the 1950s – the decade when the weakened major studios abandoned long-term talent contracts and MCA became a major industry player. In Tom Kemper’s eye-opening new book, Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents, he reveals that talent [...]
Michael Haneke, the Austrian director who has crossed national boundaries to make films in France, the US and now in Germany with Das weisse Band (The White Ribbon, 2009) – newly crowned with the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival – is concerned with the ethical problem inherent in the viewing situation. The [...]
Malte Hagener’s Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939 offers a remarkably multifaceted and compelling historical study of the European cinematic avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s and its considerable legacy in film culture as a whole. While a wealth of scholarship has traditionally engaged the film avant-garde [...]
Cinesexuality’s thesis is premised on a desire to want cinema as a lover. What this might mean alerts us firstly to the fact that the book is a title in the Ashgate series Queer Interventions. While cinesexuality as a phenomenon knows no gender, exceeding both hetero-normative and homosexual frames of reference, it might also be [...]
As the internet age opened up a cosmos’ worth of publication room, film writing grew as if every solar system deserved its own life-form. Many old-time critics lament the net as the demise of criticism, although any survey would reveal that, through the new medium, we have inherited the better along with the worse – [...]
In The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity, UK lecturer Linnie Blake argues for the horror genre’s unique ability to confront the consequences of traumatic national events for individual and collective identities. Central to Blake’s study is an examination of the process of nation building, which typically has emphasised continuity, commonality [...]
With an interest in cinema tracing back to the 1960s, an involvement in video and new media art since the 1980s, coupled with a deep understanding of shifting tendencies in criticism and theory, Australian artist, critic and writer John Conomos is inimitably placed to examine transgeneric relationships in moving image culture. Drawing upon filmmakers and [...]
Making a picture is a big love affair, the biggest love affair in the world.
– Sam Peckinpah (1)
Sam Peckinpah’s personal relationships all seemed to sour and, time after time, so did his cinematic affairs. While his critical reputation has been variable, since his death in 1984 his work has found legitimate respect and his films [...]
It seems the Nouvelle Vague will not go away, and we may wonder if there has been any other film movement in history – from Neorealism to Dogme, from New Hollywood to New German Cinema – that has held such a fascination. Numerous books have been written about it, yet has the subject still to [...]
In Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia, Marijke de Valck takes a cultural theory and media studies approach to a subject that most cinephiles experience at a more visceral level. This academic point of view is unique, particularly de Valck’s use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to situate the film festival as a central [...]
In Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), Jessica Lange and Nick Nolte are lying in bed discussing the increasingly disturbing harassment they are experiencing at the hands of an ex-convict played by Robert De Niro. While Nolte is fearful, Lange seems fascinated by the prospect, almost welcoming the intrusion into their family life. As she says, [...]
If Pauline Kael is often pugnacious, Jonathan Rosenbaum belligerent, Anthony Lane frivolous, then what word should we bestow upon David Thomson? Perhaps impertinence fits best, as Thomson so often takes a small thought for a walk and arrives at the subtly insolent. We may notice it in a passage from his A Biographical Dictionary, where [...]
Few film genres have been so critically despised and disparaged by film critics as the Ancient World epic. Serious, whole-hearted appreciations of such films in the press have been rare. Ridicule, impatience and disgust tend to permeate the reviews… Rarely has there been such an extreme disjuncture between critics and the public as there has [...]
We know immediately from the title that this book accepts the existence of a “New Wave” in British cinema. B.F. Taylor begins with an unambiguous canon.
For the record, his series in full is: Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959); Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1958); The Entertainer (Richardson, 1960); Saturday Night and Sunday [...]
The fabulous was Jim Sharman’s birthright. Grandson and son of successive managers of the legendary Jimmy Sharman’s Boxing Troupe, he fills the opening pages of this remarkable memoir with vivid recollections of an early childhood spent in sideshow alley amid the strong men and the fairy floss vendors, the trick motorcyclists and the acrobats juggling [...]
Keith Beattie’s Documentary Display: Re-Viewing Nonfiction Film and Video is an extremely valuable and refreshing contribution to the burgeoning field of documentary film studies. Beattie’s book takes as its focus elements of documentary form and practice that are somewhat undervalued and often criticised in much of the dominant writing on and theorisation of the field. [...]
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas…” Too sentimental!
– Boris (Woody Allen), as he throws out one of his poems (which is from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) in Allen’s Love and Death (1975)
But, of course, only those who have personality and [...]
