Welcome to Issue 76 of Our Journal the editors September 2015 Editorial What is Asia? It seems a simple question, yet the answers vary depending whom – and when – you are asking. Our focus on documentary in Asia in this issue is not, to quote one of our contributors, intended to su...
Surprised by La Jetée Ned Schantz September 2015 Feature Articles “Once you find a hidden picture, it seems always to have been there staring you in the face” D.A. Miller (1) “One needs to stop looking at the pho...
About Elly, About Jane Ivan Kreilkamp September 2015 Feature Articles Asghar Farhadi’s 2009 film About Elly - only released in the U.S. four years after the triumph of Farhadi’s 2011 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner A Sepa...
Persistent Abstraction: the Animated Works of Max Hattler Dan Torre September 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: 1923 aka Heaven (Max Hattler, 2010) Max Hattler is a German-born animator-filmmaker who has been steadily producing works for well ove...
Being Elizabeth Bishop: Barbara Hammer’s New Documentary on an American Poet Wheeler Winston Dixon September 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Welcome To This House Barbara Hammer’s Welcome to This House: A Film on Elizabeth Bishop (2015) is that rarity among documentary films...
Political all the Way: the 62nd Sydney Film Festival Angelos Koutsourakis September 2015 Festival Reports The Sydney CBD, with its futuristic, functionalist architecture, chain restaurants and cafes, and army of corporate workers walking frenetically, can ...
Memories and Confessions of a Visit to Il Cinema Ritrovato Peter Hourigan September 2015 Festival Reports Suddenly, I realised that this film was impregnated with the gaze of cinema goers from the time of the Occupation – people from all walks of life, mos...
Frontiers of Vision: The 15th T-Mobile New Horizons Film Festival Rebecca Harkins-Cross September 2015 Festival Reports At the closing night ceremony of the 15th T-Mobile New Horizons Film Festival, the host asked each winning filmmaker that graced the stage what “new h...
Midnight Sun Film Festival Carmen Gray September 2015 Festival Reports Finland’s Midnight Sun has in its three decades become known among cinema aficionados as one of the world’s most legendary and unique film festivals. ...
Despite (or With) the Politics… Work-Life and -Love Balances: The 68th Locarno Film Festival Jaimey Fisher September 2015 Festival Reports The annual controversy at this year’s Locarno Film Festival started well before its screens flickered to life in early August. In fact, a vehement pro...
Local and/or General… Of Time and Place at the 50th Karlovy Vary and 6th Odessa International Film Festival Cerise Howard September 2015 Festival Reports Feature image: Eva Zaoralová holding aloft her book, The Story of a Festival 2015 found the summertime festivals in Karlovy Vary and Odessa in intros...
Ingram, Rex David Melville September 2015 Great Directors January 15, 1893, Dublin, Ireland. d. July 24, 1950, Los Angeles, USA The world’s greatest director. Erich von Stroheim Rex Ingram may be the bes...
Two Books on Alfred Hitchcock: Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd and Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Volume 2 by Sidney Gottlieb (ed.) Ken Mogg September 2015 Book Reviews Discussing Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936), Peter Ackroyd likens its director “to another great London visionary, Charles Dickens.” In a few deft line...
Two More Books on Hitchcock: Hitchcock Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films by Alain Kerzoncuf and Charles Barr, and Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock by William Rothman Ken Mogg September 2015 Book Reviews Early in Hitchcock Lost and Found (p. 2) Alain Kerzoncuf and Charles Barr note the unique “enthusiasm” that has surrounded the director's films –...
Three Books from Kino-Agora: Mise en Scène by Frank Kessler, Découpage by Timothy Barnard, and Montage by Jacques Aumont Paul Macovaz September 2015 Book Reviews Three recent additions to Caboose’s Kino-Agora series are dedicated to fundamental terms in the history of film theory and criticism: Frank Kess...
Labour Intensive: The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and their Guild by Miranda J. Banks Michael Sandlin September 2015 Book Reviews In the immediate aftermath of the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike, the unfailingly myopic New York Times directed its geriatric Grey L...
All the Histories: A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard by Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline (eds) Adrian Danks September 2015 Book Reviews In the opening paragraph of their introduction to A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard, Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline situate a particular cinephilic re...
Figure of Light: On Persistence of Vision: The 21st-Century Film Criticism of Stanley Kauffmann by Bert Cardullo (ed.) Gary Bettinson September 2015 Book Reviews Feature image: Stanley Kauffmann, photographed in 1998. Credit: Jack Manning/The New York Times. For admirers of Stanley Kauffmann – chief film criti...
Remembering the Future: L’Herbier and L’Inhumaine David Melville September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film ‘On leaving the theatre one has the impression of having witnessed the birth of a new art.’- Adolf Loos What to say about a film that, ninety years...
Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Night Train (1959) James Knight September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Night Train may not at first grip you tightly, but it is a film that blows cool, sad cigarette smoke, moving the hair on the back...
Death of a President (Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1977) A. R. Teschner September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Jerzy Kawalerowicz is known for his attention to detail, and in Death of a President (1977) the textures are so clear that a casual viewer ignorant ...
The Cost of Living: Philippe Garrel’s J’entends plus la guitare Adrian Danks September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Philippe Garrel’s J’entends plus la guitare (1991) is an intimate, unadorned roman à clef quietly but intensely covering an expanse of years in the re...
‘Look at us in the mirror’: Art and Intimacy in Philippe Garrel’s Emergency Kisses (Les baisers des secours, 1989) Joanna Di Mattia September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Emergency Kisses begins with a couple quarrelling about something most couples don’t usually quarrel about – who should play one of them in a film the...
Le Révelateur: Philippe Garrel, May ’68 and the Zanzibar group Pip Chodorov September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film France has seen its share of revolutions: time and again the established order is shaken up by a group of young warriors and a new regime is establish...
Les Amants Reguliers (Regular Lovers, 2005) Nicholas Brodie September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film It was supposed to be the revolution to end it all. Director Philippe Garrel’s 2005 film Regular Lovers spends three hours asking the question: why di...
Miklós Jancsó’s The Confrontation (1969) John Edmond September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Miklós Jancsó’s The Confrontation (Fényes szelek, 1969) opens with a four-minute shot. We see the back of Judit’s head as she (Andrea Drahota, red h...
The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary 1966) Hamish Ford September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, Hungary, 1966) offers an early distillation of the qualities for which Miklós Jancsó soon became an acknowledged master...
Cantata (Miklós Jancsó, 1963) Luke Aspell September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film When Ambrus (Zoltán Latinovits) drives to his father's farm in the last third of Cantata, viewers familiar with Miklós Jancsó's work will recognise th...
The Red and The White (1967): The Political and Metaphysical Sequence Shot Adam Powell September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film “For a while I was famous for my ‘long takes’, these sequence shots that last several minutes. At that time it was really special. Within these sequen...
Bill Morrison: Ghost Trip and Just Ancient Loops Darragh O’Donoghue September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Bill Morrison deals with the physical – the feel and look of decaying nitrate film. Yet still, his admirers insist on finding the metaphysical in his ...
Money Makes the Movies Go Round: Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Argent Shari Kizirian September 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Motion pictures get made in a tensile tradeoff between art and commerce, expression and resources, creator and investor, and most elementally both on-...
Mother Joan of The Angels Jorge Didaco May 2003 CTEQ Annotations on Film This article was published first in Issue 26 of Senses of Cinema (May 2003) and re-published in Issue 76 (September 2015) Mother Joan of The Angels (...
The Good Cats of Chinese Documentary Bérénice Reynaud September 2015 Documentary in Asia Feature image: Female Directors (Yang Mingming, 2012) “Black cat, white cat – who cares? As long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.” Sichuan pr...
300 million clicks: Under the Dome and the Chinese Documentary Context Dan Edwards September 2015 Documentary in Asia Feature image: Chai Jing in Under the Dome Few documentary makers anywhere the world would dare dream of attracting 300 million viewers – especially ...
Mapping Asian Documentary Film Festivals since 1989: Small Histories and Splendid Connections Ma Ran September 2015 Documentary in Asia Feature image: ticket booth at the 2013 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. This is not an article that seeks to survey the Asian docum...
Wages of Resistance and the Spiritual Problem of Sanrizuka Markus Nornes September 2015 Documentary in Asia We all know the desire to resist the state. Anytime we receive a parking ticket, we feel it stirring in our hearts. Every time we pay taxes on our har...
On the Banning of a Film: Tan Pin Pin’s To Singapore, with Love Olivia Khoo September 2015 Documentary in Asia Publicity image for To Singapore, with Love, taken from Johor Bahru, Malaysia, looking at Singapore from the other side of the straits. Tan Pin Pi...
On Whose Behalf? Ethics in Indian Social Documentary Film and Practice Shweta Kishore September 2015 Documentary in Asia Feature image: Harrison Cudjoe in YCP 1997. “Prison exists only in the mind. Who isn’t in prison? It's only a matter of a larger prison or a smaller ...
Sufi poets, story-telling as performance and non-violence in Indian documentary film Anne Rutherford and Laleen Jayamanne September 2015 Documentary in Asia Anne Rutherford and Laleen Jayamanne interview Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar. Feature image: Still, So Heddan, So Hoddan (Like Here, Like Ther...
