Questions of Agency: Sundance 2019 Bérénice Reynaud March 2019 Festival Reports The Warden and the Young Man In 2012, Ava DuVernay made history by becoming the first black woman filmmaker to get a major award at Sundance. Since then, she has continued to change the way African American wo...
Rendez-vous in Autumn: China-US Summit/American Film Market/AFI FEST Bérénice Reynaud March 2019 Festival Reports On Oct 30, the day before the American Film Market opened in Santa Monica, the Asian Society of Southern California had organised the US-China Entertainment Summit at the Skirball Center, allowing the speakers ...
Recovering the Phantom Limb: An Interview with Jennifer Reeder Brigitta Wagner March 2019 Interviews 2019 was the year that the Berlin International Film Festival wanted us all to know that it takes gender parity seriously. Not only did the festival expand, in its 69th edition, the gender statistics it keeps o...
“Il faut souffrir”; or, Why the personal was (mostly) not the political at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival Marco Abel March 2019 Festival Reports “Il faut souffrir,” Fritz Lang, playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterful Le mépris (Contempt, 1963), laconically declares to screenwriter Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), as he shrugs off the outraged respons...
“I Do Not Believe”: Night of the Eagle (Sidney Hayers, 1962) Wheeler Winston Dixon March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film Sidney Hayers’ Night of the Eagle (1962) was based on the 1943 Fritz Leiber novel Conjure Wife, which had been filmed once before by Universal as Weird Woman (Reginald Le Borg, 1944), one of its “Inner Sanctum”...
Fractured Images and Tainted Dreams: Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America Danica van de Velde February 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film Towards the end of Sergio Leone’s opening sequence in Once upon a Time in America (1984), the film’s protagonist, David “Noodles” Aaronson (Robert De Niro), flees to a bus station where he buys a one-way ticket...
World Poll 2018 – Part 6 the editors January 2019 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 6: Nick P. George Papadopoulos Andreea Pătru Yoana Pavlova Jesse Percival Antoni Peris Grao Simon Petri-Lukács Andréa Picard Fidel Jesús Quirós Christopher Llewellyn Reed Bérénice R...
Contemporary Chilean cinema: a provisional cartography of an expanding field Valeria de los Ríos Escobar and César Albarrán-Torres December 2018 Latin American Cinema Today: An Unsolved Paradox Spanish version / Versión en Español. Icónica. By Valeria de los Ríos Escobar Translated by César Albarrán-Torres In their 2010 book Novísimo cine chileno, Ascanio Cavallo and Gonzalo Maza coined the ter...
Thin Air, Long Lines: 45th Telluride Film Festival Maria San Filippo December 2018 Festival Reports This will not be a typical festival review, in that it will not offer in-depth commentary – or even a “best of” roundup – on a sizable selection of what was programmed over Labor Day weekend in the mining town-...
Weerasethakul, Apichatpong Nathan Senn October 2018 Great Directors b. 16 July 1970, Bangkok, Thailand Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s cinema is one of transgression, of social, carnal and metaphysical border-crossings. Born on July 16, 1970 in Bangkok, Weerasethakul was raised ...
Navajo Joe (Sergio Corbucci, 1966) Ben Kooyman June 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film Among his many claims to fame, Marlon Brando was noteworthy as a supporter of Native American heritage and civil rights, famously sending activist Sacheen Littlefeather to the 45th Academy Awards ceremony to pu...
Formative Portals: Nostalgia for a Slow Burn Cinephilia Hamish Ford June 2018 Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia I fully admit to having trouble with nostalgia – in life, but especially on film. So searing is the “real” version, I find, it has to be at least partially repressed. Nostalgia’s screen portrayal, meanwhile, ne...
“Half Sick of Shadows”: Voyeurism and Psychosis in Warning Shadows David Melville June 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Often,” says Tieck in William Lovell, “the world, its people, and its contingencies flicker before my eyes like flimsy shadows; often I appear to myself to be a shadow playing a part, coming and going and doi...
The Archive of Detritus Daniel Fairfax June 2018 Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia If asked about the film that has most affected me, then I want to answer with Godard’s Weekend (1967), Straub/Huillet’s Othon (1969), Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Pasolini’s Accatone (1960), Stroheim’s Greed (1...
The Dionysian Stage of 2018: Interview with Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt Daniel Fairfax June 2018 Feature Articles 2018 is a World Cup year, so it is only to be expected that football-themed films will proliferate. None, however, are likely to be anywhere near as deliriously idiosyncratic as Diamantino, a film which, with i...
South Korea’s Shadow Land: The 19th Jeonju International Film Festival Marc Raymond June 2018 Festival Reports Over the course of five days at this year’s Jeonju film festival, I watched 21 films, the vast majority of which were Korean, with 15 of these being world premieres. This is in stark contrast to my first visit ...
“A Very YES, AND Person”: An Interview with Emma-Kate Croghan Doosie Morris June 2018 Feature Articles In 1995 faux-fur coats and matte lipstick were a big thing, Café Rumbarellas was on Brunswick Street and Australians still had a discernible accent. Writer and director, Emma Kate Croghan was 23 years old. A g...
Rotterdam – Delete/Ignore: locating gremlins and glitches in the machine. Or, how I met the humans and parasites of Planet IFFR Tara Judah March 2018 Festival Reports When I scroll through Instagram, I am fascinated by the ability of the interface. I am at a film festival, having what I presume to be a good time, until I see in my feed that someone else, at the very same fes...
Sustaining a Cinema of Modest Means: An Interview with Ted Fendt, Ricky D’Ambrose and Graham Swon Brigitta Wagner March 2018 Feature Articles Despite the controversy surrounding Dieter Kosslick’s imminent departure after a long tenure as director of the Berlin International Film Festival and German filmmakers’ open letter last November calling for mo...
What Would Siegfried Kracauer Say About Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals? Jennifer Ruth March 2018 Feature Articles This article focuses primarily on Nocturnal Animals, arguing that like movies such as The Blue Angel and M, Nocturnal Animals gives creative expression to our political ills -- in this case, obscene economic i...
Before On the Beach: Melbourne on Film in the 1950s Adrian Danks December 2017 Screening Melbourne “City images are historical creations, and are often more resistant to change than the modernisers anticipate, although the resistance may be stronger at some times than others.”- Graeme Davison Stanley Kr...
“Women’s Stories Aren’t Told in Laos”: An Interview with Mattie Do Emma Westwood December 2017 Feature Articles When examining great moments in film history, Laos very rarely – if ever – rates a mention. Even though this South East Asian nation found its place very early on the world cinema map thanks to Merian C. Cooper...
1988: Little Vera (Vasily Pichul) Daria Ezerova December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema “A Bomb into the Lap of Mother Russia”: Little Vera (Vasiliy Pichul, 1988) In May 1989, an issue of the American magazine Playboy caused a furore in the Soviet Union. The cover model, Natalya Negoda, clad in a...
New York Film Festival 2017: Robert Mitchum Retrospective + Main Slate Jackson Arn December 2017 Festival Reports To watch the films of Robert Mitchum – the Golden Age Hollywood star whose 54-year career was the subject of a major retrospective at the New York Film Festival this October – is to grow acquainted with a style...
Reimagining Reality: 61st BFI London Film Festival Tara Judah December 2017 Festival Reports I was born in London, but I grew up in Australia. To my eyes, the people of London move with direction and urgency, as if the city somehow has the stuff pulsing through their veins. Usually, I move like someone...
1965: Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures (Leonid Gayday) Andrey Tolstoy December 2017 100 Years of Soviet Cinema The People’s Secret Speech: Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures, 1965 Of the twenty highest-grossing films in the history of the Soviet box office, just under half were comedies. But only a few comedies...
The Toad and the Insect: On Mark Bartholomew’s Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing Nafis Shafizadeh December 2017 Book Reviews Several years ago, my wife and I spent a fall week in a remote cabin in the hills of Big Sur. We spent the time mostly enjoying the seclusion of the cabin and its immediate surroundings, spending languid aftern...
Anderson, Lindsay Luke Aspell December 2017 Great Directors b. 17 April 1923, Bangalore, India. d. 30 August 1994, Angoulême, Charente, France. “If you enjoy L’Eternel Retour, you may enjoy also King Kong, but not Black Narcissus. If you enjoy Black Narcissus you ca...
The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924) Darragh O’Donoghue September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Hardened fans of the action movie often deplore the inclusion of a love story. It disrupts the narrative, they protest, and is only driven by commercial imperatives (the action film too commercial?!). But the...
Floating Life: The Heaviness of Moving Stephen Teo July 2017 Pioneering Australian Women Another meditation on migration, but this time also sketching a possible Asian-Australian cinema.
Fascism for Liberals: RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987) Christian McCrea June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film When Orion Pictures first sent out promotional material for RoboCop, they would indulge every possible comparison to Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), going so far as to use the latter’s orchestral theme in the...
Cinema against Cinema: Daech, le cinéma et la mort by Jean-Louis Comolli Daniel Fairfax June 2017 Book Reviews Outside of France, Jean-Louis Comolli is principally known in the film studies world for his stint as the editor of Cahiers du cinéma in the years 1965-1973, a period during which his name was attached to such ...
Pan African Film Festival 2017 Bérénice Reynaud June 2017 Festival Reports Pan African Dreams: the Dreams that Dance Attending PAFF is to open oneself to a world of images, colours, sounds – even the suggestion of smells – from all corners of the African diaspora, and, for its 25th a...
IndieLisboa: Invisible Cities Carmen Gray June 2017 Festival Reports Joseph Roth wrote in 1933 that rising nationalism had temporarily defeated Jewish writers in Germany, but not before they’d given its literature something great: the theme of the city. He’s one of a number of l...
Budd Boetticher: The Last Hollywood Rebel Wheeler Winston Dixon June 2017 Revisiting Budd Boetticher Budd Boetticher (pronounced “bettiker”) was primarily known for his work as a director in the Western genre, but I didn’t want to tell him that. Boetticher refused to be pinned down with any labels, and describ...
Karlson, Phil Wheeler Winston Dixon June 2017 Great Directors The Forgotten Master of Film Noir Born: 2 July 1908 Died: 12 December 1985 Director Phil Karlson’s best films - Tight Spot (1955), Five Against the House (1955), The Brothers Rico (1957), Hell to Eternity (1...