Issue 59

In his now infamous press conference, Lars von Trier’s comments about Nazis and Jews received the overwhelming focus of attention, but other contentious words were overlooked.

Jean Baudrillard’s encounter with cinema, and cinema’s encounter with Baudrillard’s thought are the twin subjects of this extensive discussion of American cinema of the 1970s and beyond.

Of the great Ernst Lubitsch masterpieces, this luminous 1932 comedy has perhaps received less praise than it deserves.

In light of Sidney Lumet’s recent passing away, this article pays tribute to his powerful 1964 dramatised study of a post-Holocaust survivor living a life of quite desperation in Harlem.

In the late 1970s, Catherine Berge’s encounter with both the films and person of King Vidor was a seminal turning point in her life. Here, she talks about her personal history with the director and her 1980 film devoted to him.

A great director, no doubt, but as Peter Tonguette demonstrates, King Vidor was equally proficient at the art and craft of editing.

Author Jiwei Xiao analyses the aesthetics and the theme of memory that underpin the films of Jia Zhangke, the foremost contemporary Chinese director of his generation.

Flannery Wilson looks at the characterization of Taipei in a range of films, and sees something different to the norm emerging in director Arvin Chen’s depiction of the city in his 2010 Au Revoir Taipei.

Set amongst the world of refugees and asylum seekers in the port city of Calais, Philippe Lioret’s 2009 film says much about France’s confrontation with the symbolic ‘other’.

An introductory essay on the post-colonial emergence of a regional cinema often overlooked in contemporary film history.

I have a confession to make. I have known about Udine’s Far East Film Festival (FEFF) since its inception in 1999. But somehow I had never made it unt...

Despite the attention given to the Toronto International Film Festival, the Images Festival may be the city’s most ambitious, if not in scale, then in...

It’s hard to be objective about Boston as a movie town. I’ve lived in (relative) close proximity to the small city for most of my life, and when I fou...

After 57 years of running a short film festival you’d think that the organisers of the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival would know exactly...

He put his face between her breasts. "We don't know how long it will be before Reptilicus is sighted over Copenhagen, but until he is, let's make ever...

“Ideas are on the street.” –Abu Othman Amro bnu Bahr al-Jahed (776 - 869) “The cinema is there to mend wounded souls.” – Egyptian filmmaker, Yousry...

Two important figures of the cinephilic landscape left Los Angeles in 2010. One was Rose Kuo, who since 2007 had assumed the direction of the AFI Film...

Unlike older and more established Australian international film festivals (the Melbournes, the Sydneys, even the Brisbanes) the still very young Bigpo...

For two years running I've attended the Fribourg International Film Festival. The timing of my engagements with the festival has been propitious; it s...

b. 18 August 1906, Paris, France d. 31 October 1996, Clamart, Hauts-de-Seine, France Cinema is the art of forming a team. –Jean Cocteau Carné’s ...

Critical study of the oeuvre of Billy Wilder is still surprisingly scant almost a decade following his death. Rather than cogent analysis that reaches...

In Billy Wilder’s hilariously acid The Fortune Cookie (1966), sports cameraman Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) gets clobbered by football star Luther “Boom...

Comedy is a notoriously slippery subject. Kant called laughter “an affect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing” (1), and the...

Darwin’s Screens opens with a quote from the man himself: “I was in those days a very great storyteller” (unpaginated). In the following 232 pages, Ba...

Self-identified “filmophile” Brian McFarlane opens his “touch of the memoirs” at age ten, reminiscing about reviewing films he had never seen – someth...

Set in a Franco-era Spain that has made only the barest of concessions to modernism (there are telephones and cars), but remains fully locked down und...

“In my day, there were too many symbols.” - Juan Fernandez Soler (Alberto Closas) in Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist) Madrid in 1951 was a...

Alongside Kihachi Okamoto’s Dai-bosatsu toge (The Sword of Doom, 1966) and Hideo Gosha’s Kedamono no ken (Sword of the Beast, 1965), Masahiro Shinoda’...

“I would like to be able to take hold of the past and make it stand still so that I can examine it from different angles.” - Masahiro Shinoda (1) In...

The cinema of Nicholas Ray, even in early efforts like They Live by Night (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950), Flying Leathernecks (1951), and The Lu...

Does it come at all as a surprise that the first image in the often-hallucinatory Johnny Guitar features an explosion, and one whose cause is not imme...

N. B. Those who wish to avoid prior knowledge of the story, particularly its climax, should put off reading these notes till after seeing the film. Ho...

It is not impossible to believe that before Nicolas Ray there was never an American director who better understood the unbearable fragility of being h...

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s first film, Der stadtstreicher (The City Tramp, 1966), the director enters a public pissort and sneers at his derelict a...

Although with regard to career chronology Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss) marks the culmination of Fassbinder’s so-called “BRD (Budesr...

In a scene from Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul, Emmy, an aging, widowed German national, and Ali, a much younger Moroccan immigrant, sit together at ...