Author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Locked down as I have been in Melbourne, Australia, and unable to attend the Toronto International Film Festival in person for a second year running, I confess what by any rational standard would be an intensel...

In 2016, the 5050x2020 campaign was launched by the Swedish Film Institute at the Cannes Film Festival, and big names were there to share in the announcement including the Swedish Minister for Culture and Democ...

To say that in recent years that broader amorphous beast loosely called “the film industry” has been the centre of often high-profile discourse about gender inequality is an understatement. Beginning in 2017, t...

Originally published in Senses of Cinema issue 80, September 2016. “You know the money shots in porn films? Well, this was just a different substance: it was red” – Director Roberta Findlay on the relationshi...

One way of thinking about Peter Strickland’s works is as baubles of obsession. They are little spheres of influence, spheres of logic that marry fecund dialogue and audiovisual atmosphere with field recordings ...

In a cultural and industrial landscape significantly altered by the barrage of sexual-abuse and harassment allegations against now-notorious Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in late 2017 that sparked the #Me...

Amongst the 260 odd pages of Kathy Acker’s 1993 experimental novel My Mother: Demonology, somewhere near the front of that iconic postmodern feminist writer’s book is featured a chapter called “Clit City”. Fram...

Rape-revenge films directed by women are a rarity, and rape-revenge comedies even rarer; somehow, connecting the two, we find queen of the Czech avant-garde Věra Chytilová and her 1998 film Pasti, pasti, pastič...

The great misnomer that “everything is online” revealed to me once again how flawed an assumption it is about a year ago when I was thinking through my earliest memories of Australian women filmmakers. I feel I...

This dossier coincides with retrospectives of the work of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani at the Melbourne International Film Festival and the Queensland Film Festival in July and August, 2018. This dossier is ...

Our planet has provided the most beautiful and ever changing natural landscapes in the form of mountains, oceans, forests and deserts. Human beings remain astonished by these variegated marvels of nature, sculp...

Catalan filmmaker José Ramón Larraz’s psychological horror film Symptoms – a UK production – was the British entry at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974. Despite this, the film was considered all but lost for dec...

This is how the story goes: iconic shock-goth-glam-rock darling Marilyn Manson once tried to make a film about Lewis Carroll and Alice’s Wonderland tales, but so outraged were the public by the trailer alone th...

The first dedicated film magazine I ever bought was in March 1988, Issue #68 of the Australian publication Cinema Papers. Nick Cave was on the cover to promote the release of John Hillcoat’s Ghosts… of the Civi...

Across her 34-year career, actor Claudia Karvan has become one of the most familiar faces on Australian screens, winning numerous awards and becoming nothing less than a national film and television icon. With ...

The slightest spirit of ye olde timey explorer boils within when one ‘discovers’ a movie with little online imprint. Susan Lambert’s 1984 feminist terrorist heist film On Guard is such a curio, and outside a sp...

“No film has ever succeeded in making sex look at once so alluring and so glum. From its opening sequence, the film is a castration fantasy that conducts a running critique of the titillation it is marketing.” ...

From the very outset, the Alice tales seemed destined for a life beyond the page. Indeed, the stories themselves speak with passion and eloquence about expanding our familiar imaginative frames of reference. Al...

Volker Schlöndorff’s 1979 adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum remains even by contemporary standards one of the most harrowing German films about World War II ever made. Unquestioningly, a grea...

That Candy Box of Vulgarity: Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967) Upon the fifty-year anniversary of the release of Jacqueline Susann’s bestselling novel Valley of the Dolls in February 2016, many noted how...

This dossier brings together a collection of articles on a number of filmmakers and filmmaking practices a little beyond Senses of Cinema’s typical focus. This serves as an introduction to and consideration of ...

“You know the money shots in porn films? Well, this was just a different substance: it was red” – Director Roberta Findlay on the relationship between pornography and horror “Roberta is a pioneer, a ground-br...

In July 1974 in the seaside city of Sarasota, Florida, television journalist Christine Chubbuck pulled out a gun while broadcasting the news and shot herself in the head on live television. The whereabouts of t...

The production history of Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) is one so rich that it at times risks distracting us from the intricate internal mechanics of the film itself. Leading up to his directorial debut,...

Luciano Tovoli’s reputation as one of the great Italian cinematographers is commonly framed in reference to his work on Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 film, The Passenger. But although very different movies, it ...