Welcome to Issue 62 of our journal the editors April 2012 Editorial Once upon a time in France, long, long before The Artist and all it represents was even a blimp on distant horizons, film culture had an altogether different dimension and orientation. That orientation can be s...
“Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still am…”: An Interview with Jean-Louis Comolli (Part 1) Daniel Fairfax April 2012 Feature Articles In depth interview with one of the seminal figures in the emergence of a Marxist/Althusserian oriented film theory. In this first of a two-part interview, to be published over two issues, Comolli discusses the “Cahiers years” between 1965 and 1973.
The Artist and the MacMahon Factor Zafar Masud April 2012 Feature Articles Looking into France’s international success with The Artist, Zafar Masud discovers the little-known history of a Parisian theatre and the cinéphiles that made its reputation.
The Death of Film and the Hollywood Response Andrew Gilbert April 2012 Feature Articles Could all of this year’s major Oscar nominated films be read as allegories of the end of the “celluloid” era? Andrew Gilbert argues that, collectively, their narratives reflect certain anxieties about the post-celluloid age of filmmaking.
The Artist: Mystification Beyond Artistry Joseph Natoli April 2012 Feature Articles Joseph Natoli discusses the incongruous presence of a black and white, silent film evoking Hollywood’s “golden age” in an era of hi-tech culture that has displaced all that age represents.
Boy Meets Girl: Architectonics of a Hitchcockian Shot Murray Pomerance April 2012 Feature Articles Boy meets girl…and falls in love. In this case, Cary Grant with Ingrid Bergman in Notorious. Murray Pomerance’s analysis demonstrates how Hitchcock’s astute mise-en-scene makes it happen.
To Experience Song of Ceylon Daniella Gitlin April 2012 Feature Articles Insightful analysis of Basil Wright’s 1934 documentary that goes beyond the standard readings of the film in respect to its colonial discourse.
Sounds from the City in Film Noir Eloise Ross April 2012 Feature Articles This article provides a penetrating analysis of the often over looked importance of audio elements and their design in a range of 1950’s film noirs.
Ginette Lavigne’s La belle journée Jean-Louis Comolli March 2012 Feature Articles Ginette Lavigne’s film offers a radical alternative to conventional uses of the sound/image dynamic.
Ernst Lubitsch and Nancy Meyers: A Study on Movie Love in the Classic and Post-Modernist Traditions Robert Alpert March 2012 Feature Articles Lubitsch and Meyers? At first glance an unlikely couple, yet Robert Alpert traces the convolutions of movie love across differing eras to reveal its continuities and fault lines.
All Visual and No Sound Would Make Jack a Dull Boy Gabrielle Ringuet March 2012 Feature Articles Focusing on a key scene from Kubrick’s The Shining, Gabrielle Ringuet discusses how the actors’ vocal performances and the scene’s sound design contribute to its effectiveness.
Colombiana: Europa Corp and the Ambiguous Geopolitics of the Action Movie David Martin-Jones March 2012 Feature Articles The films made and distributed by Luc Besson’s company are, too often, dismissed by critics. Yet they may, argues David Martin-Jones, provide interesting insights into understanding global cinema.
John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright and the Search for a Moral Order Richmond B. Adams March 2012 Feature Articles Set in the Jim Crow South, Ford’s depiction of race relations and its attendant moral ambiguities are discussed by Richmond Adams.
Unlikely Heroes: The 31st Sundance Film Festival and the 20th Pan African Film and Arts Festival Bérénice Reynaud March 2012 Festival Reports As many had expected, Benh Zeitlin’s first feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, won The Grand Jury Prize, as well The Excellence in Cinematography Aw...
Raiders of the Lost Archive: the 6th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival Dirk de Bruyn March 2012 Festival Reports The biennial Bangkok Experimental Film Festival had its sixth incarnation from 24 January to 5 February 2012 with a focus on the archive as inspiratio...
“The Cinema Leads Me There”: the 41st International Film Festival Rotterdam Daniel Fairfax March 2012 Festival Reports Ugly city, beautiful cinema. It strikes me that the world’s major film festivals are opposed in nature to the cities that host them. Take Berlin. T...
Grand Finales: The International Forum of New Cinema at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival Mattias Frey March 2012 Festival Reports Berlin was particularly icy this February; even discounting the gusts of wind that howled across Potsdamer Platz in the evenings, temperatures dropped...
Alice in Wonder-Mall and Wonder-Beach: The AFI/Fest and American Film Market Bérénice Reynaud March 2012 Festival Reports Your fearless film critic, Alice, was getting ready to cover the new edition of the AFI Fest which, this year again, was Presented by Audi and offerin...
Signals, Symptoms and Seditious Suggestions: The 41st International Film Festival Rotterdam Celluloid Liberation Front March 2012 Festival Reports Understanding how people can be manipulated through emotions, for example, is as useful for those who wish to avoid this as it is for those who wish t...
The Politics of Body Parts, Programming and the Redistribution of Land: The 49th Viennale Barbara Wurm February 2012 Festival Reports In a state in which politics are generally considered synonymous with proportional representation (and that is a nice and rather euphemistic way of de...
Between the lines and to the point: The 68th Venice Film Festival Barbara Wurm February 2012 Festival Reports By the time this report is out, many changes have occurred within Italian and international festival politics. What is left to say now is only this mu...
Audience and Industry: The 24th International Documentary Festival Amsterdam Courtney Sheehan February 2012 Festival Reports “You bump into experiences, films, each other, opinions...on the internet you’re always searching for something, but during a festival you’re not look...
Pelechian, Artavazd Daniel Fairfax March 2012 Great Directors b. Feb 22, 1938, Leninakin (now Gyumri), Armenia. 1. In film festivals, cinémathèques, galleries and conferences around the world, the same sce...
Pride and Prejudice: Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow Graham Daseler March 2012 Book Reviews Not long after joining the staff of The New Yorker in 1968, Pauline Kael wrote a review of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969),...
Wild/Lives: Trickster, Place and Liminality on Screen by Terrie Waddell Susan Rowland March 2012 Book Reviews In the late 19th century, film as a technology, art form and social phenomenon and psychoanalysis as theoretical and practical working with untamed pa...
Timeless or Timely – The Perils of Editing a Queer Film Classics Series: Word is Out by Greg Youmans; Montreal Main by Thomas Waugh and Jason Garrison; Zero Patience by Susan Knabe and Wendy Gay Pearson Marcin Wisniewski March 2012 Book Reviews I imagine editing a book series is somewhat akin to curating an art show or even a film retrospective: in all three cases the curators/editors need to...
Into the Past: The Cinema of Guy Maddin by William Beard; and Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin edited by David Church Cerise Howard March 2012 Book Reviews At the time of writing we are but a few weeks out from the 84th Academy Awards. Extraordinarily, the two films most likely to be most showered with Os...
New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past, edited by Alistair Fox, Barry Keith Grant, and Hilary Radner James Bennett March 2012 Book Reviews “he space in which historical and cinematic narratives intersect remains an insufficiently examined but potentially fecund area of study.” (Reid Perki...
Addressing the Political to the Personal: Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image by Roger Hallas Joseph S. Valle March 2012 Book Reviews As film scholar Jane Gaines notes in her groundbreaking article “Political Mimesis” (1), documentaries have a reputation for being a catalyst for soci...
The Newest New Wave: New Austrian Film edited by Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck Todd Herzog March 2012 Book Reviews Is there an Austrian National Cinema? The concept of national cinema has always been difficult to pin down. Especially in a country whose domestic ...
The 21st Century Screenplay: A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Tomorrow’s Films by Linda Aronson; Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice by Steven Maras Matt Hawkins March 2012 Book Reviews The study of screenwriting has become increasingly popular at Australian universities, and a perpetual question for the screenwriting lecturer is what...
Better off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro Mithuraaj Dhusiya March 2012 Book Reviews How often have we longed for well-researched and documented scholarly works on zombie literature and films? And how equally often have we been disappo...
“People are waiting”: Elia Kazan and America America Adrian Danks March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Martin Scorsese concludes his A Personal Journey… Through American Movies (co-directed and co-written by Michael Henry Wilson, 1995) with a brief pass...
Identity in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass Arthur Rankin March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961) concerns the problems encountered by two teenagers – Wilma Dean (“Deanie”) Loomis (Natalie Wood) and Bud Sta...
East of Eden Michael Da Silva March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “East of Eden is more personal to me; it is more my own story. One hates one’s father; one rebels against him; finally one cares for him, one recovers...
American Friend Carlota Larrea March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Discussion of the New Waves of European national cinemas that emerged after World War II has often focused on those movements’ stances towards America...
What is Said and Left Unsaid in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai Christopher Lupke March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Hai shang hua (Flowers of Shanghai, 1998) is a film constructed like no other: it doesn’t follow the conventions of gradual and deli...
L’eclisse Christopher Sharrett March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Michelangelo Antonioni’s name seems to have fallen somewhat into disrepute in US film culture over the last several decades, his main concerns – alien...
The Passenger Jonathan Dawson March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “We know that under the image revealed there is another which is truer to reality and under this image still another and yet again still another under...
Helen Levitt Deane Williams March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “The films I most eagerly look forward to will not be documentaries but works of fiction, played against and into and in collaboration with unrehearse...
A Man Escaped Gwendolyn Audrey Foster March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “When one is in prison, the most important thing is the door.” – Robert Bresson (1) Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut...
Voices With(out) a Face: On Robert Bresson’s Procès de Jeanne d’Arc José Sarmiento March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “In my Trial of Joan of Arc I have tried to avoid “theater” and “masquerade”, but to arrive at a non-historical truth by using historical words.” - R...
Les dames du Bois de Boulogne Manjari Kaul March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Only the conflicts that take place inside the characters give a film its real movement.” - Robert Bresson (1) “Destiny is tragic but I prefer a f...
I Magliari Pasquale Iannone March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Released two years before his international breakthrough Salvatore Giuliano (1962), Francesco Rosi’s I magliari (1959) is the story of immigrant Itali...
Salvatore Giuliano Darragh O’Donoghue March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film The trailer for Salvatore Giuliano (1962) begins with a town crier walking down a Sicilian street, banging a drum. This is followed by a group of men ...
Lucky Luciano Pasquale Iannone March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film As Gian-Piero Brunetta has noted, Francesco Rosi’s Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972) and Lucky Luciano (1973) saw the Neapolitan filmmaker retu...
Beyond Camp or the Politics of Persona: Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress Peter H. Kemp March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Marlene Dietrich was used as a camera subject instead of as a person. She’s photographed behind veils and fishnets, while dwarfs slither about and be...
The Docks of New York William “Bill” Blick March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Miles of docks wait day and night for strange cargo – and stranger men”, reads the initial intertitle of Josef von Sternberg’s masterfully constructe...
Shanghai Express Wheeler Winston Dixon February 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “A shaft of white light used properly can be far more effective than all the color in the world used indiscriminately.” – Josef von Sternberg (1) ...
The Last Command: Josef von Sternberg’s Life and Death of a Russian Extra Shari Kizirian February 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film In a profile of Josef von Sternberg for the New Yorker in March 1931, the year Americans got to see the English-language version of Der blaue Engel (T...
Wild Night in El Reno Brian Darr March 2008 CTEQ Annotations on Film Wild Night in El Reno (1977 USA 6 mins) Filmmaker: George Kuchar Storms have been a motif found throughout filmmaker George Kuchar’s work. W...
Au hasard Balthazar Dana Polan February 2007 CTEQ Annotations on Film Au hasard Balthazar (1966 France/Sweden 95 mins) Prod Co: Argos Films/Athos Films/Parc Film/Svensk Filmindustri/Svenska Filminstitutet Prod: Ma...
The Epic That Never Was Robert Keser April 2005 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Epic that Never Was (1965 Britain 74 mins) Source: NFVLS Prod Co: BBC Prod, Dir, Scr: Bill Duncalf Phot: Robert Kauffman Ed: Brian Keene Cast:...
Australia’s Role in the Global Kung Fu Trend: The Man from Hong Kong Stephen Teo September 2001 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Man From Hong Kong (1975 Australia 103mins) 35mm Source: ScreenSound Prod Co: Golden Harvest, The Movie Company Ex. Prod: Raymond Cho...
Au Hasard, Balthazar and Mouchette Bill Mousoulis June 2000 CTEQ Annotations on Film A discussion of these two Bresson films.
Pickpocket Rick Thompson June 2000 CTEQ Annotations on Film A discussion of this profoundly mysterious film.
