Features the editors July 2012 Feature Articles Contents: “Yes, We Must Improve Ourselves”: Damsels in Distress by Peter Tonguette April and August: Moonrise Kingdom by Max Nelson Blood fro...
Pure West: Drive, nostalgia for postmodernism Marko Bauer July 2012 Feature Articles It is a one way street and there, Walter Benjamin says: “What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red ne...
Crossing the Pont de Varsòvia: The Critical Resilience of Pere Portabella’s Warsaw Bridge Matt Carlin July 2012 Feature Articles The corpse of a scuba diver is found in the midst of a burnt forest. How did he get there? That is the question. And it has a practical, if highly u...
‘Each like a coal drawn from the fire’: Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line Francesco Baldo July 2012 Feature Articles Every end is a beginning…there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles (1841) Heroism cannot properly account for o...
Hugo, Remediation, and the Cinema of Attractions, or, The Adaptation of Hugo Cabret Jennifer Clement and Christian B. Long July 2012 Feature Articles It’s obvious that Martin Scorsese’s movie Hugo (2011) showcases its director’s great love of cinema and cinema history. Less obvious, perhaps, is the ...
“Yes, We Must Improve Ourselves”: Damsels in Distress Peter Tonguette July 2012 Feature Articles A great misapprehension surrounds the four films of Whit Stillman: he is said to only be interested in the rich or super-rich. The dye was cast twenty...
Myth, Environment and Ideology in the German Jungle of Aguirre, the Wrath of God Jacques de Villiers July 2012 Feature Articles In a career now stretching fifty years and collectively encompassing over sixty features, short films and documentaries, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, der ...
April and August: Moonrise Kingdom Max Nelson July 2012 Feature Articles When the Moonrise Kingdom (2012) trailer debuted, a friend of mine watched it seven times in a row and even shed a few tears of excitement. Wes Anders...
Blood from a Stone Murray Pomerance July 2012 Feature Articles It’s a difficult enough task to film New York. I do not mean by this, of course, to set all or part of a film in New York, as so many have done who n...
“This Pain Grows Like the Sun”: Epistemology, Myth and History in Black God, White Devil Peter Henné July 2012 Feature Articles I Some films with episodic constructions have better parts than others; each admirer of Le Plaisir (1952) may favour one story adaptation over the ot...
For Wrocław and the World: The 12th New Horizons Film Festival Alison Frank August 2012 Festival Reports Some festivals take place below the radar of a city: local residents are barely aware that there is a film festival on, and only films by the most wel...
Festival Reports the editors July 2012 Festival Reports Contents: Vera Brunner-Sung on the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival Daniel Fairfax on Cannes Cerise Howard on Fribourg Mike Walsh on the Ho...
The South’s Not Long for This World: The 26th Fribourg International Film Festival Cerise Howard July 2012 Festival Reports In the wake of former Artistic Director Edouard Waintrop's triumphal, ceremonious departure to become Director of Les Cinémas du Grütli in Geneva ...
Control, Contingency and Continuity: the 2nd Berlin Documentary Forum Chiara Marchini Camia July 2012 Festival Reports The Berlin Documentary Forum’s second edition set itself the task of addressing the documentary image and its purported state of instability in the fi...
Save the Panda: the 14th Far East Film Festival Chris Berry July 2012 Festival Reports The Far East Film Festival has ever-increasing audience numbers and takes place at the more prosperous end of the Italian peninsula, in the charming F...
Cinema, Time Regained: The 13th Jeonju International Film Festival Yun Mi Hwang July 2012 Festival Reports Growing up in Korea, I knew Jeonju as an historic city famed for its local culture, including manual paper-making and exceptional food. My unashamedly...
Retrieving the Cinema’s Past: The 26th Cinema Ritrovato Peter Hourigan July 2012 Festival Reports For over a quarter of a century Bologna has been celebrating the rediscovery and recovery of lost and forgotten films. Its Cinema Ritrovato festival r...
Shifting Focus: The 36th Hong Kong International Film Festival Mike Walsh July 2012 Festival Reports The Hong Kong International Film Festival keeps on changing pretty radically every year because… well, Hong Kong changes pretty radically as it is buf...
“Ah! The cruelty of Cannes!”: The 65th Cannes Film Festival 2012 Daniel Fairfax July 2012 Festival Reports On the first weekend of this year’s Cannes, the heavens opened with a ferocity and persistence rare for the Côte d’Azur, dousing the red carpet galas ...
Dispatch from the Rockies: The 9th Big Sky Documentary Film Festival Vera Brunner-Sung June 2012 Festival Reports Cultivated by a committed group of documentary filmmakers in Missoula, Montana, the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival has established itself as a seri...
Jordan, Neil Carole Zucker July 2012 Great Directors b. February 25, 1950, Sligo, Ireland With each successive outing, Neil Jordan–without doubt the most interesting filmmaker to emerge thus far f...
Book Reviews the editors July 2012 Book Reviews Contents: Michelle Langford on A Social History of Iranian Cinema: volumes 1 & 2 Daniele Rugo on Les Ècarts du Cinema Justin Owen Rawlins on ...
Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema Michelle Langford June 2012 Book Reviews Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941 and Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 As I turn over the last page of volume two of Hamid Nafi...
The logic of the unauthorized lover:Jacques Rancière’s Les écarts du cinema Daniele Rugo June 2012 Book Reviews Cinephilia – the very specific love inspired by cinema – has been repeatedly declared deceased. However, whether one takes cinephilia as a historical ...
The Afterlives of Acting: Famous Faces Yet Not Themselves: The Misfits and Icons of Postwar America by George Kouvaros Justin Owen Rawlins June 2012 Book Reviews Writing in the midst of the Method’s postwar ascension within the public consciousness, Philip Hope-Wallace observes that “it is fair to remember that...
Wizards and Robots and Movies, Oh My! A comparative review of Keith M. Johnston’s Science Fiction Film and James Walter’s Fantasy Film Daniel Eisenberg June 2012 Book Reviews Keith M. Johnston’s Science Fiction Film: a Critical Introduction is dedicated to his parents because they helped him become a science fiction fan a...
Irreverent Irrelevancies: Zona by Geoff Dyer Tony McKibbin June 2012 Book Reviews Few writers seem to do facetious erudition with the obtrusively self-aggrandizing more completely than Geoff Dyer. Whether it is calling a novel Jeff ...
Pretty, Film and the Decorative Image by Rosalind Galt Lauren Bliss June 2012 Book Reviews Is prettiness, the less-than-beautiful category of superficiality and surface, derided in film studies? Rosalind Galt’s Pretty teases out the politica...
Teen Film: A Critical Introduction by Catherine Driscoll Athena Bellas June 2012 Book Reviews In the final section of her 2002 book, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory (1), Catherine Driscoll begins exploring tee...
Cinémathèque Annotations on Film the editors July 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Contents: Manjari Kaul on The Burmese Harp Darragh O'Donoghue on Kokoro Margaret Barton-Fumo on Kanto Wanderer David Melville on Flowers & t...
Electra Revisited: On Claire Denis’ 35 rhums José Sarmiento June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at your gate, father – your hound-bitch, daughter, friend. It was my love that did us both to death.” ...
Green Fish John Fidler June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Lee Chang-dong’s wrenching, tonally nuanced first film, Chorok mulkogi (Green Fish, 1997), packs a quiet wallop. By turns emotionally coercive, visual...
Towards a Japanese Anthropology: Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desire of the Gods Adam Bingham June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “For me, the idea for the film lies in its attitude to human beings. In my case, this attitude is one of obsession…. In my work, people take centre st...
Kokoro Darragh O’Donoghue June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Sensei (Masayuki Mori) is first seen standing in a doorway, looking down at his wife as she sits embroidering (1). Shizu (Michiyo Aratama) has opened ...
No Fear, No Die Gwendolyn Audrey Foster June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film One never forgets Bresson. Admiration is a very complicated thing. It’s like alchemy; you admire something and then one day you realise that this admi...
Kanto Wanderer Margaret Barton-Fumo June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Undoubtedly one of the best of the Japanese B-stylists, the critical discussion surrounding Seijun Suzuki tends to focus on his notorious dismissal fr...
Doomed Love Paulo Cunha June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Between November and December 1978, Portuguese public television presented, in six weekly episodes, the original television version of Manoel de Olive...
The Pleasure of the Image – The Flowers and the Angry Waves David Melville June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “The world changes all the time. We can no longer win by force alone.” - Akira Kobayashi in The Flowers and the Angry Waves In his 1973 essay, Le Pl...
White Material Marcin Wisniewski June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film One could say that sound has always featured as an important element in the work of Claire Denis. Her 1999 Beau travail is a choreographed dance set t...
Peppermint Candy Rahul Hamid June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Lee Chang-dong is the cinema’s great poet of disappointment. His films are preoccupied by the ways in which the mores of contemporary South Korean soc...
The Intruder Kath Dooley June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film In an interview following the Toronto Film Festival screening of L’intrus (The Intruder, 2004), Claire Denis remarked that her films are sometimes unb...
The Burmese Harp Manjari Kaul June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Can’t you see that whatever you do is futile? The armies of Britain and Japan can come and fight all they wish. Burma is still Burma. Burma is the Bu...
Between Innocence and Experience: Lee Chang Dong’s Secret Sunshine Adrian Danks June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film Miryang (Secret Sunshine, 2007) begins with the sky. Shine-ae (Jeon Do-yeon)’s car has broken-down outside of Miryang (which literally translates, sup...
Oasis Marc Raymond June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film The story of Lee Chang-dong’s artistic career is a fascinating one. He started as a novelist before moving to the medium of film in his late thirties,...
Gestures of Intimacy: Claire Denis’ I Can’t Sleep Saige Walton June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film No doubt those who are familiar with Claire Denis’ work will be well aware of how her films are invested in and expressive of the material connections...
Walls and Mirrors: Iranian Films at the 2012 Melbourne International Film Festival Adrian Danks July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has showcased the New Iranian Cinema since a special focus in 1993 called “Spotlight Iran”. It has ro...
Old Saint Nick: We Can’t Go Home Again and Don’t Expect Too Much Blaine Allan July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier Commemorating Nicholas Ray in his centenary year, in 2011 his last feature-length motion picture, We Can’t Go Home Again (1973-), started doing laps a...
“A little piece of a big, big universe”: Beasts of the Southern Wild Daniel Eisenberg July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the entire universe will get buste...
“Every Official Knows What the Problems Are”: Interview with Chinese Documentarian Zhao Liang Dan Edwards July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier Zhao Liang’s Shang fang (Petition, 2009) is one of the most celebrated – and grueling – works of the independent Chinese documentary movement. Filmed ...
Seriously Funny: History and Humour in The Sapphires and Other Indigenous Comedies Rose Capp July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier The Sapphires (Wayne Blair, 2012) opens in an idyllic rural setting. A group of young Aboriginal girls run home across the paddocks in the fading even...
Alternative Archives and Individual Subjectivities: Ou Ning’s Meishi Street Luke Robinson July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier In 2001, to national jubilation, Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics. In the seven years that followed, the city underwent a makeover on a scale unp...
Coeur fidèle Adrian Danks July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier I just want to say this: you have to love it and hate it at the same time – and love it as much as you hate it. This fact alone proves that the cinema...
The Blindfold Mike Walsh July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier Garin Nugroho’s Rindu kami padamu (Of Love and Eggs, 2004) is a warmly utopian picture of Indonesian village life that stresses a supportive community...
Street Level Visions: China’s Digital Documentary Movement Dan Edwards July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier In 2012, the 61st Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) will feature “Street Level Visions: Indie Docs from China”, a retrospective of seven di...
The Affluent and the Effluent: Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Waste Christen Cornell July 2012 2012 MIFF Dossier About halfway between Japan and the East Coast of North America lies the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an immense swirl of plastic fragments estimated ...
61st Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier (2012) the editors July 2012 Uncategorized To coincide with the 2012 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), Senses of Cinema has commissioned a series of articles that cover many differe...
