Search Results for: "Hitchcock"

Not all actors are filmmakers, and not all filmmakers can act. And certainly not all actor-filmmakers walk in slow motion in Times Square with cans of oil poised on their heads (in performance protest of the 20...

Agnès Varda in Californialand A blonde walks in the street, sporting fashionable sunglasses; the image is in black and white, yet has a very contemporary feel. Maybe it’s the elegant physical freedom with whic...

This second visit to Belgrade, Serbia’s Alternativa Film/Video festival opened up a response to the parallel film histories encountered at last year’s attendance (documented in Senses of Cinema here) through Lj...

In Lav Diaz’s Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan (Norte, the End of History), a 250-minute musing upon the reality of transgression and the perception of transformation, an old adage springs to cinematic life, its ...

Looking over the Frontier It’s a pity that, at Sundance, we are so busy trying to discover the next hot feature that the wonderful offerings of the New Frontier section are not at the top of our priorities. A ...

The 1950s were not good years for feature filmmaking in Australia, still less so for Australians making films. There were two releases to exhibitors in 1950: Britsh company Ealing’s Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart)...

THE ENTRIES PART 1 Francisco Algarín Navarro Victor Alicea Michael Anderson Geoff Andrew Julian Antos Armas Miguel Charlotte Aumont Sean Axmaker Martyn Bamber Mike Bartlett Raphaël...

Lucas Hammer Lee Hill Wai Ho Alexander Horwath Peter Hourigan Cerise Howard Brian Hu Christoph Huber David Hudson Darren Hughes Tara Judah Dominik Kamalzadeh Daniel Kasman Christopher Kearney...

Darragh O’Donoghue SvenErik Olsen George Papadopoulos Michael Pattison Yoana Pavlova Antoni Peris Sierra Pettengill Raymond Phathanavirangoon David Phelps Jit Phokaew Andréa Picard Matías Piñei...

How did Italian cinema manage to become so big when from Rossellini to Visconti and from Antonioni to Fellini, no one recorded sound with images? A simple answer: the language of Ovid and Virgil, Dante and Le...

Introduction This article discusses one way Malaysian-Australian James Wan (b. 1977-) (1) can be considered or constructed as an author. Wan is best known for the film Saw (2004), which he co-wrote with Leigh ...

In this article, I will examine the work of contemporary Australian filmmaker Robert Connolly (b. 1967), a director who could be considered amongst the most successful contemporary filmmakers working in Austral...

My introduction into the strange world of Luis Buñuel began with El Ángel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel, 1962), and it was a case of love at first sight. Never had I been exposed to such a wonderful ble...

Prelude “Saraband” is a mournful, heart-wrenching piece of music. It came about during the very short period of time that Bach was free from any religious responsibility in Köthen. In this relaxing, fruitful p...

On arrival in Pordenone, the city is very much as I expect it: a nondescript small town in northern Italy, centred on its vibrant piazza, with an architectural mixture of 19th century apartment blocks, Fascist-...

Le Quai des brumes (Marcel Carné, 1938) opens on a fog-swept, darkened rural road leading to the port of Le Havre. A truck driver narrowly avoids crashing into the hitchhiking figure of colonial Army deserter J...

Though canonised as one of the cinema’s greatest directors, Jean Renoir was preeminently a master of capturing energy. He depicts humanity rumbling with life in La Grand illusion (1937)’s prison camp, in the ch...

“ New York City is the place where they said Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side ” –Lou Reed, Walk on the Wild Side, 1972 Irrespective of his status as an American cinéaste maudit who is still largely ign...

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard describes enclosed light viewed from a distance as an image of refuge for those who have been travelling. The house on the horizon embodies shelter as well as watchfuln...

Mine was at least a twofold purpose for flying half way around the world to the far west late this June just passed. Long had I wanted to make my way to Karlovy Vary for the Czech Republic's A-list film festiva...

Midway through the 2013 Locarno Festival, celebrated Georgian director Otar Iosseliani made headlines by exposing a normally veiled aspect of the festival circuit. Iosseliani was in the scenic Italian-Swiss lak...

I could go on and on about Tarkovsky. Thousands have.  Some directors seem made for critical fodder. Hitchcock, Welles, Ford, Kurosawa, and others in the cinematic pantheon have inspired an academic avalanch...

When we think of cinema filming history perhaps our default position is to imagine Ben Hur (Wyler, 1959) and Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960) through to Ride the with the Devil (Lee, 1999) and Lincoln (Spielberg, 2012...

When I was halfway through reading David Thomson’s new book, I saw Vincente Minnelli’s musical The Band Wagon (1953) in Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. It felt like a perfect David Thomson moment. The Band Wagon immer...

Viewing The Big Parade 88 years after its initial release, and 25 years following its inclusion in my upper-level course on the war film, elicited complex feelings. On the one hand, although the film still stan...

Christian Petzold b. 14th September 1960, Hilden, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany Christian Petzold When the Association of German Film Critics named Christian Petzold’s Barbara the best feature film of 2...

György Pálfi’s Final Cut – Ladies & Gentlemen (2012) is a movie made out of other movies, literally. It is YouTube’s beloved film mashups and supercuts on steroids. According to Andy Baio, who coined the te...

Orson Welles, Sophia Loren, Marlon Brando, Lauren Bacall, Michael Caine, John Gielgud and Ben Kingsley: whilst this list offers a roll-call for some of the most famous film stars of the Twentieth Century, it al...

In Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley, 2008), the writer/director explores a substantial group of underappreciated Australian genre films produced in the 1970s and 1980s. The genteel historicity o...

Argento’s World of Giallo Dario Argento (b. 1940-) has been making gialli for a long time. His first three features – L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, 1970), Il gatto a no...

In the final shot of Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (Deep Red, 1975), the amateur detective/jazz pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) stares icily at his own reflection in a pool of still-warm blood. The killer...

At the risk of crying wolf, it seems accurate to characterize academic film studies as being more than simply interdisciplinary, as more perilously resembling a discipline in the throes of schizophrenia. With t...

In a rare idle moment at Cannes, amidst the hectic schedule of screenings, I found myself nursing a glass of mineral water on the terrace of the Caffé Roma, a sprawling establishment abutting the Croisette, mer...

By 1950 television as the prevailing mass medium had come to stay in American cultural and social life, as well as colonising the Yankee imagination and the movie business overall. Even the once indestructible ...

1 “I’ve been around the world several times, and now only banality still interests me.”  At the beginning of Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983), a voice tells us, “He wrote” this. “He”:  Marker?  We have no ...

Way back in 1982, Vertigo debuted on the BFI’s Sight & Sound Poll of Best Films at number 7. Since then it has slowly ascended, finally summiting the list in 2012, displacing the oft-thought irreplaceable C...