Welcome to Issue 71 of our journal the editors July 2014 Editorial Issue 71 sees a new Senses of Cinema presented to the world! After many months in development, we’re very pleased to share with you our newly designed website. It offers an enhanced navigational experience and ...
“There is Nothing to Carry Sound”: Defamiliarisation and Reported Realism in Gravity Stuart Bender July 2014 Feature Articles Although it is arguably unrealistic, one of the conventions of science fiction cinema is the presence of sound in the vacuum of space, for instance th...
La Distancia and the Magic of Cinema: An Interview with Sergio Caballero Daniel Fairfax June 2014 Feature Articles After winning a Tiger Award at the 2011 Rotterdam film festival, Sergio Caballero’s sui generis feature debut Finisterrae, with its tale of two ghosts...
Lights, Camera, Melodrama: The Role of Lighting in The Cloud Capped Star Bonnie Fan June 2014 Feature Articles André Bazin’s discussion of neorealism in “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism” (1) brings forth an interesting contrast between two different directi...
The Long Take as a Reaction to the Past in Contemporary Romanian Cinema Sam Littman June 2014 Feature Articles In 2007, Romania capped a startling four-year streak of major victories on international cinema’s grandest and most controversial stage, the Cannes Fi...
The Perils of Fantasy: Memory and Desire in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive Clint Stivers June 2014 Feature Articles WOOOOSH – Zoom deep into blackness. Thump. A metallic blue box drops to the carpet: this sequence, nearly two hours into David Lynch’s Mulholland D...
“#Hashtag: Hunger Games Catches Fire, Audience Entertained” Joseph Natoli June 2014 Feature Articles "The risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism." Thomas Piketty (1) "So what do you think, now that the whole ...
Down and Out in Helsinki and Tokyo: Aki Kaurismäki and Akira Kurosawa’s Humanist Tales Marc Saint-Cyr June 2014 Feature Articles Of all the evils that have challenged and tormented humanity throughout the long road of history, poverty is among the most terrible. The degree to wh...
Focalisation Realism and Narrative Asymmetry in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men Ben Ogrodnik June 2014 Feature Articles In the very beginning of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), before we are introduced to characters or any images, what we first experience as an...
Tarrying With the Nothing: Asking Anew Heidegger’s Question of Being in the cinema of Bela Tarr Tan Xing Long Ian June 2014 Feature Articles Martin Heidegger begins Being and Time with a question that seeks, in its very repetition, to return philosophical questioning to its foundation: “Do ...
The 6th CPH PIX Luke Richardson July 2014 Festival Reports Now in its sixth year, the annual CPH PIX Film Festival has quickly found itself in the figurative front row of Danish cinema. One of a triptych that ...
Hanging on in There: Hong Kong Popular Cinema Featured at the 16th Far East Film Festival Chris Berry June 2014 Festival Reports “Hong Kong Calling!” Europe’s leading festival of Asian popular cinema, the Far East Film Festival (FEFF) in Udine, Italy, announced the theme for its...
A New Homogenous State of Film: The 13th TriBeCa Film Festival Tara Judah June 2014 Festival Reports The thirteenth TriBeCa Film Festival can be considered a great success if growth is a value indicator. Official screening figures boast “over 120,000 ...
When Industries Collide: SXSW 2014 Courtney Sheehan June 2014 Festival Reports The 2014 edition of SXSW will (or at the very least, certainly should) always be remembered for the tragic drunk driving accident that ultimately took...
After and Without Film, But With Presence: The 60th International Film Festival Oberhausen Tara Judah June 2014 Festival Reports Too many voices have hailed the death of film. But it’s not dead. For the major studios – that seek to control production, distribution and exhibit...
Native Peoples, Global Films: the Maoriland Film Festival Felicity Collins June 2014 Festival Reports In the Maoriland Film Festival program notes, the mihi or welcome dedicated the inaugural festival to the memory of Aunty Borgia, a formidable figure ...
The Festival that Came in from the South: The 28th Fribourg International Film Festival Cerise Howard June 2014 Festival Reports I've written three times previously in Senses of Cinema on the Fribourg International Film Festival, covering the festivals in 2010, '11 and '12. Whil...
Scanning Animafest: the 24th Animafest Dirk de Bruyn June 2014 Festival Reports Animafest’s 24th iteration in Zagreb, Croatia brought two innovations. The Animafest Scanner Symposium and the third outdoor screening at the Zagreb M...
The Ritual of Cannes: the 67th Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax June 2014 Festival Reports The first time one attends the Cannes film festival, the overwhelming sensation is one of shock – shock at a world so displaced from one’s everyday ex...
The Storytellers: The 3rd Berlin Documentary Forum Chiara Marchini Camia June 2014 Festival Reports The third edition of the Berlin Documentary Forum did justice to the nickname of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in which it ...
Reichardt, Kelly Sam Littman June 2014 Great Directors b. 1964, Miami-Dade County, Florida, USA Kelly Reichardt is a most unlikely ambassador of current American independent cinema. Her films are not remo...
Pintilie, Lucian Olivia Maria Hărşan June 2014 Great Directors b. November 9, 1933, Tarutino, Bessarabia, Romania (today Tarutyne, Odessa Oblast, Ukraine). omic imagination, dexterity in contriving simple plots...
“The Image Will Come at the Time of the Resurrection”: Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian by Michael Witt Daniel Fairfax July 2014 Book Reviews On the concluding page of his study of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), Michael Witt tells us of the publication of a collection o...
Making Sense of Censorship: Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity, by William Mazzarella Erin O’Donnell June 2014 Book Reviews The publication of Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity by William Mazzarella, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago...
Representing Identity: Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Philosophy for A New Generation, by Paul W. Kahn Tony McKibbin June 2014 Book Reviews Like Stanley Cavell’s relatively recent Cities of Words and Robert B. Pippin’s Hollywood Westerns, Paul W. Kahn’s Finding Ourselves at the Movies is a...
Threatening Platforms: Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing by Caetlin Benson-Allott Laura Henderson June 2014 Book Reviews We live in an age of constant media access, of Netflix, Youtube, and an unprecedented shift towards “extreme” content. It is easy to forget that once,...
Les Plages d’Agnès Tamara Tracz June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film There is a difference between biography and autobiography. The first explores the events of a life, while attempting a true and representative narrati...
Du côté de la côte Darragh O’Donoghue June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film Du côté de la côte (1958) is easily dismissed as a frothy travelogue; Agnès Varda herself refers to its “touristy” images (1). Like her previous s...
L’Opéra-Mouffe Inge Fossen June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film How does one avoid sounding sexist when discussing a great female artist like Agnès Varda and her work against the swirlingly relativistic backdrop of...
Elsa la rose Adrian Danks June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1965, Agnès Varda made a short, intense documentary on the then almost 40-year relationship between the French writers Louis Aragon and Elsa Triole...
Black Panthers Beth Mauldin June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1968, Agnès Varda was living in Los Angeles with her husband, director Jacques Demy, who was there to begin filming his first Hollywood film, Model...
Three Resurrected Drunkards Ioana-Lucia Demczuk June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film What better way to disguise one’s anger with the current political situation than through what looks like a quirky, yet poignant comedy? Yet, what sta...
The Whole Family Works: Nagisa Oshima’s Boy Adam Bingham June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film For his 14th feature (in only a decade), leading Japanese New Wave luminary Nagisa Oshima made a fascinating film that has come to be regarded as one ...
Faust David Heslin June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film Show me what mysteries the universe doth hold, Even to the vaulted heavens; Show me all the suns, Shimmering like snowy flakes; All the secrets ...
Philosophies of Non-sense: Jan Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky Ben Hjorth June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film verything begins with a horrible combat. It’s the combat of depths: things explode or make us explode, boxes are too small for their contents… monster...
The Exquisite Ecstasy and Agony of Jan Švankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure Cerise Howard June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Tactile wooden spoons, pot lids, rolling pins and boards are alchemistic tools and our bodies are the crucible for the Magnum Opus of tactilism.” ...
Little Otik Zoe Gross June 2014 CTEQ Annotations on Film An obsession with food and eating – and with corresponding ideas of appetite, taste, consumption and ingestion/digestion – pervades so persistently an...
Commedia all’italiana – Comedy Italian Style Gino Moliterno July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier To think about Italian cinema in the immediate postwar era is almost inevitably to conjure up heartrending images from the classic neo-realist films l...
I soliti ignoti Federico Passi July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier The ever popular I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, Mario Monicelli, 1958) is a pivotal film in Italian cinema. It marks the end of 1950s “p...
Il sorpasso, or Two for the Road Rolando Caputo July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier Mainly, it’s a question of speed. Two characters, one sports car, and as much velocity as you can muster on Italian freeways. Yet, it’s also about the...
Mafioso Pasquale Iannone July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier While he may be most famous outside of Italy for co-directing Federico Fellini’s first feature Luci del varietà (Variety Lights, 1950), Milan-born Alb...
Il boom Gino Moliterno July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier Undoubtedly motivated by its poor performance at the box office, and the generally hostile critical reaction it received at the time it was released, ...
Jean-Pierre Léaud Retrospective Philippa Hawker July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier To be anointed as the child of the nouvelle vague could be a burden for any actor to bear, but Jean-Pierre Léaud has carried it with grace, inventiven...
Children of the Revolution – Truffaut and Les Quatre cents coups David Melville July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier “I lie... but only once in a while. At times, if I told the truth they wouldn’t believe me. So I tell lies.” - Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), L...
Le Départ Bruce Hodsdon July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier Jerzy Skolimowski’s Le Départ (1967) was shot in three weeks on a budget of just $US100,000 – a low cost even in the mid-1960s (1). There was also a g...
“Thirteen Others Formed a Strange Crew”: Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Performance in Out 1 by Jacques Rivette Daniel Fairfax July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier Jean-Pierre Léaud strides down the middle of a narrow Parisian street, declaiming a few lines of nonsense poetry, which he repeats several times over ...
Irma Vep John Fidler July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier Originally published in Senses of Cinema Issue 56, August 2010 With its rapid cuts, roaming camera, passel of characters (some of them so pitiful t...
The Mother and the Whore Martine Pierquin July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier Originally published in Senses of Cinema Issue 48, August 2008 La Maman et la putain/The Mother and the Whore (1973 France 215 mins) Prod Co: El...
(Life and) Death in Brunswick: Ian Pringle’s The Legend Maker Rose Capp July 2014 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival Dossier The central character in The Legend Maker (Ian Pringle, 2014) is an avuncular crook, a criminal type familiar to contemporary audiences from the recen...
