Welcome to issue 79 of our journal the editors July 2016 Editorial This absolutely bumper issue of Senses of Cinema not only adheres to our long tradition at looking back at film history and forward to its exciting futures, but also – in something of a first for Senses – consi...
An Ideal Patience: On Lav Diaz and From What Is Before Robert Nery July 2016 Feature Articles Pregnant with the Word of God The Virgin will Come down the road If you give her shelter. In this famous poem, Saint John of the Cross, the great ...
Anxious Metropolis: Alienation and the Cinema of 1960s Paris in Alphaville and Playtime Owen Vince July 2016 Feature Articles “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space” - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect I recently found myself standing beneath an awning...
The Chamber Films of Matías Piñeiro: Complexity and Intertextuality in Micro-Budget Filmmaking Jason Di Rosso July 2016 Feature Articles This article interrogates the constraints of micro-budget cinema via a distinctive, non-standard approach to producing, screenwriting, mise en scène a...
Pop Provocation: A tour of the outer limits of the New Hollywood Nicholas Godfrey July 2016 Feature Articles “It’s a movie for kids, they’re not going to dig it, man!” Peter Tork, Head The story is, by now, familiar. Amidst dwindling cinema attendance and t...
‛A Man I Once Knew’: Old Tales and Bad Time in David Lynch’s Inland Empire Brian Rourke July 2016 Feature Articles The tagline for David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) describes the film as “a mystery” about a “woman in trouble”. This simple phrase coincides with mu...
A Diaspora of Desire: Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt, Benjamin Crotty and Alexander Carver Jordan Cronk July 2016 Feature Articles When Gabriel Abrantes’ Taprobana (2014) screened at the Toronto International ortilm Festival as part of a three-film program of new Portuguese cinema...
“Keep the horizon open”: An Interview with Harun Farocki Ednei de Genaro and Hermano Callou July 2016 Feature Articles In February 2014, Harun Farocki invited us to interview him at his apartment in a former communist neighbourhood in Berlinaus. He had just turned seve...
“Everything about this film was tricky”: An interview with documentary filmmaker Eva Orner on Chasing Asylum Tim O’Farrell July 2016 Feature Articles Eva Orner is an Australian filmmaker now based primarily in Los Angeles, who began her career working in Australian television in the 1990s. She moved...
Temporal Vertigo: An Interview with John Akomfrah Thomas Austin July 2016 Feature Articles The pioneering British filmmaker John Akomfrah is co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective and director of The Nine Muses (2010) and The Stuart H...
“Materials Have Memories”: An Interview with Melissa Dullius and Gustavo Jahn (Distruktur) Stefan Solomon July 2016 Feature Articles Brazilian filmmaking duo Melissa Dullius and Gustavo Jahn began working together in 1999 in Porto Alegre, and since 2007 have been based in Berlin, op...
‘A Certain Blind Look’: Žižek’s ‘absolute undecidability’ in Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Duel’ and Ridley Scott’s The Duellists Kit MacFarlane June 2016 Feature Articles For Slavoj Žižek, Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931) is "perhaps the purest case of a film which, so to speak, stakes everything on its final scene....
The China Factor: The 18th Far East Film Festival Chris Berry July 2016 Festival Reports Looking back at my review of the 17th Far East Film Festival (Senses of Cinema no.75), most of my themes from last year extend into this year. There w...
The End of Youth: BAFICI 2016 Paul Merchant July 2016 Festival Reports The Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI) has reached its eighteenth birthday. The 2016 edition of the festival gave critics and organi...
The PanAfrican Film and Arts Festival: An Exchange of Gazes Bérénice Reynaud July 2016 Festival Reports The 24th PanAfrican Film and Arts Festival (PAFF) took place again last February, in the middle-class African American enclave of Baldwin Hills/Crensh...
Of Female Trouble Here, There and Everywhere: The 30th Fribourg International Film Festival Cerise Howard July 2016 Festival Reports Ah, anniversaries. How readily a landmark – and a sense of obligation towards its acknowledgment being given a due sense of occasion – might become mo...
A Festival of Two Halves: the 2016 Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax July 2016 Festival Reports It’s one of the oldest clichés in football. A team dominates the match and is ahead on the scoreboard at half-time, but throws their lead away after p...
Good Question: Forget About the Cinema, What’s On Screen? 62. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Tara Judah July 2016 Festival Reports It’s not new to claim that cinema is in crisis. Issues of format, exhibition, theory and the very ontology of the thing have repeatedly come into ques...
Downey Sr, Robert Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2016 Great Directors “Rockin’ the Boat’s a Drag. You Gotta Sink the Boat!”: Robert Downey Sr.’s Anarchist Cinema b. 24 June 1936, New York City, United States Long, long...
Kobayashi, Masaki Andrea Grunert July 2016 Great Directors b. 14 February 1916, Otaru, Japan. d. 4 October 1996, Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan. Masaki Kobayashi’s career coincides with the so-called Golden Age of J...
Lewis, Jerry Chris Fujiwara July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director, Great Directors March 16, 1926, Newark, New Jersey, USA August 20, 2017, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA To note that the films of Jerry Lewis are a rich, pleasurable and en...
Cassavetes, John Jeremy Carr July 2016 Great Directors John Nicholas Cassavetes, December 9, 1929, New York City, New York, USA February 3, 1989, Los Angeles, California, USA To talk about John Cassavete...
Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art, by Adrian Martin Hamish Ford July 2016 Book Reviews This is a compact, dense, magisterial book. The scholarly coverage and detailed analysis of select sequences from films, television and new media art,...
Audiences at the Time of the “Two Churches”: Political Audiences: A Reception History of Early Italian Television, by Damiano Garofalo Luca Peretti July 2016 Book Reviews Damiano Garofalo’s Political Audiences. A reception history of early Italian television is a history of TV consumption in Italy during the 1950s and 1...
Constructing An African-American Film History In the Absence of Films: Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity, by Allyson Nadia Field Tanya Goldman July 2016 Book Reviews Allyson Nadia Field’s Uplift Cinema excavates the lost history of African-American filmmaking in the first half of the 1910s, uncovering a surprisingl...
The Two Johns: The Films of John Hughes: A History of Independent Screen Production in Australia, by John Cumming Jake Wilson July 2016 Book Reviews Aspiring filmmakers in Australia and elsewhere stand to learn a lot from John Cumming’s The Films of John Hughes, not least about how to deal with fun...
Cinema’s Ontological Violence: Hamish Ford’s Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time Michael Goddard July 2016 Book Reviews The emergent arena of film philosophy, or rather “film-philosophy” has, over the last decade, given rise to, in roughly sequential order, a popular di...
In Dreams. David Lynch: The Man From Another Place, by Dennis Lim Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs July 2016 Book Reviews Given the copious amounts of material already published exploring David Lynch’s artistic landscape, it is not without foundation to wonder what Dennis...
Kwaidan (1964) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster June 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film Along with Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Throne of Blood (Kumonosu-jō, ...
A Darker Shade of Noir: Psycho Sisters in The Other One (1946) David Melville June 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film “A life that should have been but never was! A fate that moved on twisting and tortuous paths!” - Dolores del Río, La Otra (The Other One) The ‘twin...
Resisting Authority in Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion (1967) Frederick Blichert June 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film In a pivotal scene from Masaki Kobayashi’s classic jidai-geki, the ageing samurai Isaburo Sasahara stands in his empty home, having just stripped it o...
Sleepless Satellites: Walerian Borowczyk’s Les astronautes (1959) David Surman June 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film It’s 1958 and scientists and engineers are in the final stages of launch preparation on Florida’s Cape Canaveral. The weather is unseasonably cold for...
The Nature of The Beast Remains… Irrepressible! Cerise Howard May 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film Few more controversial figures have enlivened cinema than the Polish polymath Walerian Borowczyk; far fewer still experienced so massive a fall from c...
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (Walerian Borowczyk, 1981) Alison Taylor May 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film A scalpel lacerates the painting by Vermeer. Margaret, her legs apart, raped, in the kitchen. The portrait of Jekyll’s father destroyed by sulphuric...
The Story of a Sin Simon Strong May 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film Each of Walerian Borowczyk's fourteen features has one thing in common. There's no toplessness in Blanche (1972) so it can't be that. The answer must ...
The Desired Objects of La Marge (1976) John Edmond May 2016 CTEQ Annotations on Film There are two elements of Walerian Borowczyk’s work more broadly that are useful in thinking about La Marge (1976). The first of these relates to Boro...
Black River Adam Broinowski April 2009 CTEQ Annotations on Film This article was originally published in issue 50, April 2009, and re-published in issue 79, July 2016. Black River/Kuroi kawa (1957 Japan 114 mins) ...
Introduction – “I’ll See You in 25 Years”: The Return of Twin Peaks and Television Aesthetics the editors July 2016 "I'll See You in 25 Years": The Return of Twin Peaks and Television Aesthetics The return of Twin Peaks (1990-1991) after more than a twenty-five year absence from television screens is a major television event, and one that is c...
May the Giant Be With You: Twin Peaks Season Two, Episode One and the Television Auteur Lindsay Hallam July 2016 "I'll See You in 25 Years": The Return of Twin Peaks and Television Aesthetics This paper argues for a concept of auteur television, in which the director expresses a consistency of style and theme that is similar to their other ...
Tensions in the World of Moon: Twin Peaks, Indigeneity and Territoriality Geoff Bil July 2016 "I'll See You in 25 Years": The Return of Twin Peaks and Television Aesthetics This article focuses on the series Twin Peaks’ representation of Native American peoples and iconography, and seeks to situate these representations w...
Telephones, Voice Recorders, Microphones, Phonographs: A Media Archaeology of Sonic Technologies in Twin Peaks Michael Goddard July 2016 "I'll See You in 25 Years": The Return of Twin Peaks and Television Aesthetics Introduction A captured Mynah bird “speaks”, activating a voice recorder, ventriloquising the voice of the late Laura Palmer; the bird having itself ...
One Way Out Between Two Worlds: The Dance Moves of Twin Peaks Alanna Thain July 2016 "I'll See You in 25 Years": The Return of Twin Peaks and Television Aesthetics David Lynch is a filmmaker who holds a special place for dance in his movies. Images of dancers and outbreaks of aberrant movement abound in his work....
“Damn Fine Coffee” Advertising: David Lynch’s TV Commercial Adaptation of Twin Peaks Agnes Malkinson July 2016 "I'll See You in 25 Years": The Return of Twin Peaks and Television Aesthetics “Damn fine coffee!” Agent Cooper exclaims, but he’s not praising the fresh brew of the Double R Diner or the Great Northern Hotel – in this context, C...
Manifest Spectres: An Interview with Robert Fischer on Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 David Heslin July 2016 Jacques Rivette It’s difficult to think of a harder film to sell than Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971). Over 12 hours long and devoid of an easily desc...
Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: From First to Last Donatella Valente and Brad Stevens July 2016 Jacques Rivette First By Donatella Valente The first shot of Jacques Rivette’s eight-part, thirteen-hour long masterpiece Out 1 (1971) shows five people holding...
From the Brontëan Text to the Tableaux: Jacques Rivette’s Hurlevent Mary M. Wiles July 2016 Jacques Rivette After having completed the final cut of L’amour par terre in late 1983, Jacques Rivette was at liberty to attend the retrospective exhibition devoted ...
A Second Wind: Jacques Rivette and Cahiers du cinéma in the Late 1960s Daniel Fairfax July 2016 Jacques Rivette The corpus of Jacques Rivette’s critical writings for Cahiers du cinéma is as influential as it is modest in size. Roughly 50 articles appeared under ...
Charting the Web: At the Demonic, Utopian Heart of Rivette’s 1970s Cinema Hamish Ford July 2016 Jacques Rivette Colin: Does that... mean anything to you? Warok: Are you the... the author of this amusing message? Colin: I'm the messenger. Warok: The messenger....
Paris is a Soundstage Miriam Bale July 2016 Jacques Rivette The common point between La Bande des quatre, La Belle noiseuse, Jeanne and Haut bas fragile: they are films about the bodies of actors: on stage, in...
The Captive Lover – An Interview with Jacques Rivette Frédéric Bonnaud September 2001 Jacques Rivette Learn here exactly what films - both contemporary and from the past - Rivette both admires and detests.
Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director (Introduction) Daniel Fairfax July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director It’s one of the great gags in film theory. Writing in 1969, Cahiers du cinéma editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni devise a seven-part critical...
Lewis, Jerry Chris Fujiwara July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director, Great Directors March 16, 1926, Newark, New Jersey, USA August 20, 2017, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA To note that the films of Jerry Lewis are a rich, pleasurable and en...
Some Basic Characteristics of the Fool (1970) The Melbourne Film Bulletin July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director “O dear god please give me the serenity to understand the things I can not change; to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference” The...
Mr Lewis, “The Idiot-Kid” and Me Jennifer Sabine July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director “At the same time, there is a contradiction because you don’t really think in terms of directing yourself. You refer and must refer to that ‘other bei...
The Bellboy (1960) James L. Neibaur July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director In 1946, when the hot new comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis burst onto the New York nightclub scene, their outrageous irreverence was just th...
The Ladies Man (1961) Murray Pomerance July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Bad Fit: The Ladies Man (1961) Players and painted stage too all my love And not those things that they were emblems of. William Butler Yeats, “The...
The Errand Boy (1961) Marco Grosoli July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director On what Jerry Lewis “has been”, the literature is abundant. And it is excellent at that: see, above all, Chris Fujiwara’s unsurpassable monography. Li...
The Nutty Professor (1963) Scott Bukatman July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Paralysis in Motion: The Nutty Professor (1963) The Nutty Professor is entirely devoted to Professor Julius Kelp’s attempts to surmount his deficienc...
The Patsy (1964) Nafis Shafizadeh July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director The Patsy and The Struggle of Jerry Lewis In 1995, the novelist and critic Gilbert Adair published his Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Ye...
The Family Jewels (1965) Jeremi Szaniawski July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director As Gilles Deleuze put it: “If you are a prisoner of the dream of the other, you are damned,” or, closer to Deleuze’s words, “you are screwed.” And it ...
Three on a Couch (1966) Chris Fujiwara July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Lewis often structures his films around a therapeutic theme: a character needs to be cured of some affliction or has a problem – at least partly inter...
The Big Mouth (1967) Steven Shaviro July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Hitchcockian Comedy and Jewish Kabuki: Jerry Lewis’ The Big Mouth (1967) One way to think about The Big Mouth (1967) is to see it as Jerry Lewis’ par...
One More Time (1970) Daniel Fairfax July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director A Cinematic Hapax Legomenon: One More Time (1970) In linguistics the term hapax legomenon (Greek for “something said once”) is used to denote a word ...
Which Way to the Front? (1970) Bernard Eisenschitz July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director With his turn to directing in 1960, Jerry Lewis became one of the rare filmmakers, and today the only one, to make courageous and effective films in H...
The Day the Clown Cried (1972, unfinished) Jean-Michel Frodon July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director The Day the Clown Cried: Jerry Lewis’ Invisible and Magnificent Film on the Holocaust Among the vast cohort of invisible films, it is one of the most...
Hardly Working (1980) Paul Macovaz July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Jerry Lewis’ Hardly Working is situated at the end of a long, uncomfortable hiatus. It was made in Florida, released first in Europe, then much later ...
Smorgasbord (1983) Michael Cramer July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director “Au revoir, Dummy!”: A Smorgasbord of Suffering It seems fitting that Jerry’s Lewis’ final film as director, Smorgasbord (1983, released on home vide...
The Genius of the System: Robert Benayoun’s Bonjour Mr. Lewis (1982) Sam Di Iorio July 2016 Deconstructing Jerry: Lewis as Director Rarely shown and never commercially released, Robert Benayoun’s six-hour mini-series Bonjour Mr. Lewis is as worth seeing as it is hard to find. This ...
