“A pin for me ’at”: Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941) Adrian Danks May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Man Hunt is the first of a string of four bold anti-Nazi films – along with Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944) and Cloak and Dagger (1946) – that Fritz Lang made between 1941 and 1946. It is also...
Children of the Revolution: Abbas Kiarostami’s First Graders (1984) Adrian Danks January 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Avaliha (First Graders, 1984) is a fascinating transitional work in Abbas Kiarostami’s career. Although it is, in many ways, a precursor to both Khane-ye doust kodjast? (Where is the Friend’s House?, 1987) and ...
Some Enchanted Evening: Mitchell Lesien and Preston Sturges’ Remember the Night (1940) Adrian Danks January 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Mitchell’s Leisen’s Remember the Night (1940) is most commonly discussed as the last film Preston Sturges wrote before becoming a director. It is often paired with another film directed by Leisen, Hold Back the...
Action and Reflection: Autobiography, Film History and the Australian Independent Documentary Adrian Danks July 2021 Australian Autofiction “The time for action is over… The time for reflection begins.” In Margot Nash’s deeply personal essay film The Silences (2015), she mines her own past, memory, history and previous filmmaking practice to tell ...
Pit Stop: Billy Wilder’s Mauvaise graine (1934) Adrian Danks April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film The low budget, independently-produced Mauvaise graine (1934) is an outlier in Billy Wilder’s career. Although it characteristically illustrates the value and practice of collaboration – it was co-directed by t...
Hard Labour: Cecil Holmes’s Captain Thunderbolt (1953) Adrian Danks April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film This is an extended and amended version of an article that first appeared in Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand, edited by Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand (Intellect: Bristol and Chicago, 20...
The Masquerade is Over: Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) Adrian Danks April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) was one of the projects closest to Billy Wilder’s heart – an organ that some commentators question even existed. It is also a notoriously vexed and incomplete work, co...
G’day Comrade: Cecil Holmes’s Three in One (1956) Adrian Danks April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film This is an extended and amended version of an article that first appeared in Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand, edited by Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand (Intellect: Bristol and Chicago, 20...
“Welcome to Bottleneck”: Peak Hollywood in Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939) Adrian Danks March 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Despite a directorial career in film and television that spread from the mid-1910s to the early 1970s, taking in a series of sustained collaborations with prominent stars (such as Bob Hope and Glenn Ford) and s...
Hear That Lonesome Whippoorwill: Terence Davies’ The Neon Bible (1995) Adrian Danks October 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film I was interested in the nature of the book, which is actually about failure. And very few things in America seem to me to be about failure, because it’s a society geared to success, and failure is not only kind...
Riding, Jumping, Standing Still: Junior Bonner (Sam Peckinpah, 1972) Adrian Danks October 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film Although Sam Peckinpah’s films are routinely described in terms of their often-fetishistic fascination with violence, influential deployment of such devices as slow motion, split screen and contrapuntal editing...
The Turning of the Earth: Elia Kazan’s Wild River Adrian Danks March 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film Although Elia Kazan is most well known for films such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1955) that feature heightened, often hyper-masculine and definitively express...