Caine, Michael Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2022 Great Actors b. March, 18, 1933, London “I'll always be around because I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.” – Michael Caine Sir Michael Caine, one of the most durable act...
From Within the Umbra of History: A Few Things about the Films of Rainer Komers, Sohrab Hura and Sylvia Schedelbauer Anuj Malhotra May 2022 Festival Reports A study of three profiled filmmakers at the recently concluded, 68th edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and the distinct strategies employed by them to install resonances and intimacie...
Film Goes On (?): The 23rd Jeonju International Film Festival Marc Raymond May 2022 Festival Reports This year’s 23rd edition of the Jeonju International Film Festival returned to full capacity for the first time since 2019, following a 2020 cancellation and a reduced capacity/hybrid version in 2021. Its sloga...
Smith, Jack: Travails of an Underground Artist Sanya Osha May 2022 Great Directors b. 14 November, 1932, Columbus, Ohio, USA d. 18 September, 1989, New York, New York, USA Artists who choose to pursue counter-paradigmatic work often do so at great personal costs to themselves, their familie...
Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949): The Insanity of Romantic Desire Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film “There is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” – Douglas Sirk Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949) has always be...
Heil Darling: a story of lips that haven’t laughed Pablo Gonçalo January 2022 Feature Articles Billy Wilder in the ‘30s In 1938, Billy Wilder was 32 years old and had been in America for five years. Born to a family of Polish Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Wilder worked as a journalist before maki...
Fashioning Rebellion Elliot Bloom January 2022 Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard Now 91 years old, Jean-Luc Godard is regarded as one of the key pioneers of the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in cinema. While the landmark works of the nouvelle vague date back to the late 1950s an...
“Slightly Out of Focus”: The Early Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Gerhard Richter Sally Shafto January 2022 Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need? – Ludwig Wittge...
Loss and Absence in Still Life Yiju Huang January 2022 Feature Articles I am most desperate when the shooting is going well. I don’t get anxious when the shooting is not going well, because…it is precisely when I know I am looking for something I can’t put in words clearly, somethi...
Jacob Holdt’s American Pictures: A Note on Style in Poor Cinema J. Ronald Green January 2022 Feature Articles Who says that fictions only and false hair Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty? - George Herbert, Jordan (I), c. 1633 In connection with its recent (Apr 21-Oct 31, 2021) one-person show of the wo...
Pom Bunsermvicha interview: “Being part of a family“ Maja Korbecka January 2022 Interviews As a result of institutional support, independent filmmaking in Southeast Asia is flourishing. Thailand has grown into a creative hub – production companies such as Electric Eel Films help realise the ideals of...
“The cinema remains alive when it is diverse”: Interview with Jean-Gabriel Périot Daniel Fairfax January 2022 Interviews Having gained attention on the film festival circuit with his essayistic found-footage retelling of the history of West Germany’s Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in Une jeunesse allemande (A German Youth, 2015, the F...
Bigger than life, or stranger: Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela: Part I Thomas Austin January 2022 Feature Articles Vitalina Varela (2019) is the seventh feature film by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. It tells the true story of a woman from Cape Verde who travels to Lisbon to attend the funeral of her estranged husband...
A Joyride through Technological Change: Interview with David Cox Dirk de Bruyn January 2022 Interviews David Cox’s innovative engagement with moving image technology extends over numerous iterations, spanning analogue formats 16mm, 35mm and Super 8 to a creative engagement with gaming to 360 degree immersive pro...
France Tour Détour Deux Enfants: History of a Book Volker Pantenburg January 2022 Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard In January 1982, a strange book was brought out by the German publisher Zweitausendeins. The title: France tour détour deux enfants / Frankreich Weg Umweg Zwei Kinder. It is an idiosyncratic adaptation of Jean-...
Not the animal is blind, but the human being, blinded by consciousness and incapable of seeing the world. A Note on Roxy Miéville, Star of Jean-Luc Godard’s First Animal Picture, Adieu au Langage Vinzenz Hediger January 2022 Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard “With all of their eyes, animals behold openness.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, The Eight Duino Elegy (trans. Alfred Corn) “The meaning of the dog is the dog.” – Andrei Tarkovski In the general excitement over...
Brave New World: the 2021 Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax August 2021 Festival Reports How does it feel to return to the cinema? I asked myself this question as my plane taxied on the runway at Nice airport one fine July morning, the shimmering waters of the Mediterranean to my right, the hilly l...
The Black And White Epic No Budget Digital Feature Film Rob Nilsson July 2021 Feature Articles When I think about contemporary American cinema there are things to be thankful for and, as with cell phone addiction and social media mania, a good deal to lament. Anyone can be a video filmmaker and almost ev...
“I Myself am a Woman”: A Conversation with Han Shuai Maja Korbecka July 2021 Interviews Writer-director Han Shuai’s Summer Blur, the winner of the Grand Prix for Best Film in the Kplus competition at the 2021 Berlinale, is a mesmerising take on film noir. Its codes and conventions are used to expl...
Collectif Jeune Cinéma at 50: A Subjective Conversation Raphaël Bassan, Théo Deliyannis and Viviane Vagh July 2021 Feature Articles In the midst of the present devastating economic and social planetary pandemic, the Collectif Jeune Cinéma (CJC) is celebrating its 50th anniversary of existence. Founded by Marcel Mazé (1940-2012) and some fri...
Lucas, George Dan Golding July 2021 Great Directors b. 14 May, 1944, Modesto, California, USA The place to start with George Lucas, director, is at the beginning. Aged 23, the then-USC film student won a scholarship from Columbia to hang out on the set of Mac...
Favouritism In The Field of Vision: Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite Cam Scott July 2021 Feature Articles Few are so beholden to normalcy as the provocateur. Whether satirically or advantageously, the transgressor fanatically attests to the strength of a moral system; tracing its limitations, feigning straining at ...
Relative Truth: The Truth and Invented Memories Linda Ehrlich July 2021 Feature Articles Molly Haskell describes La Vérité (The Truth, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2019) as “an anxious and lyrical family drama,” noting how it presents “the way in which families construct their mythologies, often at variance ...
Plague Diary (March-October 2020) Lucas Granero May 2021 What Will Become of Cinema? Postcards for the Future Translated from Spanish by Gabriela Arenas 1. Mid-March. After sharing a few days of joyful cinephilia in the city of Córdoba with friends from all over the world, quarantine restrictions are declared for th...
Memories of an Inner Flame Traversing Tierra del Fuego Kidlat Tahimik May 2021 What Will Become of Cinema? Postcards for the Future T’was the translucent-blue tongues of the glaciers licking the salty sea… yes, at the End of the World. That’s what they call Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of Argentina. It might as well be the edge of that fla...
Forgotten Wars: The AFI FEST/AFM 2020 (Virtual Events) Bérénice Reynaud May 2021 Festival Reports AFI FEST Presented by Audi Two Invisible Wars Ensconced in the mountains of the Southern Caucasus, a disputed breakaway enclave within Azerbaijan, the small republic of Artsakh (formerly Nagorno-Karabakh) is...
Lesley Stern: Outlaw of Genre Marion May Campbell May 2021 Obituary She charges space, she rakes and ruffles her cropped and bleached hair, her dark eyes narrow as her thought uncoils with the lasso of smoke from her cigarette, and she moves, lean and feline-slinky in her riot ...
‘You knew, of course, he was a homosexual’: Dirk Bogarde in Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961) Joanna Di Mattia April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Basil Dearden’s 1961 film, Victim, represents a significant moment in British film history. Released into a world where sex between adult men in the United Kingdom was a heavily policed crime, it is the first B...
“Sometimes it is easier to forget.” – A Conversation with Dieudo Hamadi Wilfred Okiche January 2021 Interviews Interview translated from French by Hélène Ballis For six deadly days in June 2000, armed forces from Rwanda and Uganda clashed on the streets of Kisangani, the third largest city in the Democratic Republic ...
When Everything Seemed Possible: London’s Arts Labs and the 60s Avant-Garde by David Curtis Wheeler Winston Dixon January 2021 Book Reviews In the 1960s, the experimental cinema scene was exploding on a world wide basis. In the era before digital technology, cellphones and email, film was seen as the most immediate and accessible art form, one that...
Beneath the Tuxedo Elegance: Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend, by Mark Glancy Tom Ryan January 2021 Book Reviews Film stars are like mirages: although we can see them, we know that they’re not really what they appear to be. They play characters born of scripts, but they also exist independently of them. At the same time, ...
World Poll 2020 – Part 2 the editors January 2021 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 2: Thomas Caldwell Nicolás Carrasco Michael J. Casey Kevin Cassidy Jeremy Chamberlin Allison Chhorn Ian Christie Emily Collins Jordan Cronk Adrian Danks Dustin Dasig Henri de Corin...
What’s in a Cone? Barbara Loden’s Wanda Between Weakness and Resilience Luise Moerke October 2020 Feature Articles In the middle of an empty parking lot, a lonely snack stall promises roadside indulgence. Its red and white marquee speaks of sunnier days, seaside vacations, bustling lines of children eager to buy sweet refre...
Missing links: exploring traces of Kubrick’s ‘unknown’ early works Mick Broderick James Fenwick and Joy McEntee October 2020 Feature Articles Previously unseen materials donated by the Stanley Kubrick estate to the London University of the Arts Special Collections Archive sheds new light on what has been a relatively ‘unknown’ period in the auteur’s ...
Countering Dominant Cinema: Temporality in Meek’s Cutoff Catherine Putman October 2020 Feature Articles Living in a time and place that moves faster than ever; ultimately, we end up with less. Lutz Koepnick suggests that subsequently we experience less substance, depth, meaning, freedom, and spontaneity. Koepnick...
Pictures of You: Allison Chhorn’s The Plastic House Louise Sheedy July 2020 Feature Articles Early shots of Allison Chhorn’s The Plastic House (2019) tell a grim story. It’s dark. Headlights make a cemetery almost visible through a rained-on windshield. We (she) are definitely in this car alone. Windsc...