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      Daniel Fairfax
      July 2021
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      Daniel Fairfax
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      Leonardo Goi
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      Glenn D'Cruz
      January 2023
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      Kohei Usuda
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      Marc Raymond
      January 2023
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      Neil Young
      January 2023
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      Saige Walton
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      Daniel Fairfax
      June 2015
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      Abel Muñoz Hénonin
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      Marc Raymond
      January 2023
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      Pujita Guha
      January 2023
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      Tom Boniface-Webb
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      Corey P. Cribb
      October 2022
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      Emmanuel Bonin
      July 2022
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      Daniel Fairfax
      March 2018
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      Emma Fajgenbaum
      March 2023
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      Jacob Agius
      February 2023
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      Faith Everard
      December 2022
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      Cerise Howard
      December 2022
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      Cerise Howard
      December 2022
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      Andréas Giannopoulos
      November 2022
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Author Daniel Fairfax

Daniel Fairfax

Daniel Fairfax is assistant professor in Film Studies at the Goethe Universität-Frankfurt, and an editor of Senses of Cinema.

Normality: The 2022 Cannes Film Festival

Daniel Fairfax
August 2022
Festival Reports
“Back to normal” was undoubtedly the prevailing ethos of this year’s Cannes film festival. This was to be expected after the cancellation of the festival in 2020, with even the powers-that-be at Cannes having t...

Man of Cinema: Jean-Louis Comolli (July 30, 1941–May 19, 2022)

Daniel Fairfax
July 2022
Obituary
Critic, film theorist and filmmaker, Jean-Louis Comolli died in his adoptive home city of Paris on May 19, 2022, at the age of 80. An editor of Cahiers du Cinéma from 1965 to 1973, his international reputation ...

Forms That Think: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard (Introduction)

Daniel Fairfax
January 2022
Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard
On June 9, 1971, Jean-Luc Godard suffered from a sickening traffic accident, with the motorcycle that he used to zip around Paris colliding with a van. He was immediately taken to an intensive care unit, and wi...

“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...

New Relations Between Forms: Luttes en Italie

Daniel Fairfax
January 2022
Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard
1.  Of all the phases of Godard’s now seven-decade career in the cinema, it is his period of avowedly militantly filmmaking from 1968 to 1972, made when he explicitly identified as a Maoist and subsumed his au...

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...

Trade Follows the Film: Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System by Lee Grieveson

Daniel Fairfax
October 2020
Book Reviews
Few recent books in film and media studies can match the ambition Lee Grieveson set himself with Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System, and even fewer have delivered in ...

The Shining and Us – Participants to the Dossier Reflect on Their First Encounter with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Marta Figlerowicz, Alexander Nemerov, Joy McEntee, Christine Lee Gengaro, Geoffrey Cocks, Ian Christopher, Mick Broderick, Jessica Balanzategui, Nathan Abrams, Valerio Sbravatti, Ilaria Franciotti, Rick Warner, Jeremi Szaniawski, Pip Chodorov, Daniel Fairfax and Filippo Ulivieri
July 2020
The Shining at 40

Founding Father: A Tribute to Thomas Elsaesser (1943–2019)

Daniel Fairfax
July 2020
Obituary
Thomas Elsaesser, a truly titanic figure in film studies, passed away unexpectedly at the age of 76 on December 4, 2019, while on a teaching assignment in Beijing. His death casts a long shadow over the field. ...

A Stranger in the Hotel: Jean-Pierre Oudart and The Shining

Daniel Fairfax
July 2020
The Shining at 40
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) has gained notoriety not only for the sheer quantity of critical analysis it has produced, a voluminous outpouring of exegesis from scholars, critics and fans alike that sho...

The Last Film Festival: the 2020 Berlinale

Daniel Fairfax
April 2020
Festival Reports
I must confess, loyal reader, that there can occasionally be something of a lag between the end of a film festival that I am covering and the moment when I finally transform my scattered thoughts into a legible...

Autumn in a Small Town: The 3rd Pingyao International Film Festival

Daniel Fairfax
January 2020
Festival Reports
It has become a truism, now, to speak of the global proliferation of film festivals in the last few decades. Worldwide, they presently number in the thousands, across all the continents, taking place at all tim...

Introduction: Communist Utopians: The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet

Daniel Fairfax
October 2019
Communist Utopians: The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
The filmmaking couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet were fond of describing their film Der Tod des Empedokles (The Death of Empedocles, 1986) as a “communist utopia”. Evidently, it was the Hölderlin tex...

Straub/Huillet’s Ecological Communism

Daniel Fairfax
October 2019
Communist Utopians: The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
In the years following Danièle Huillet’s death, Jean-Marie Straub was something of a fixture in the Parisian repertory cinema scene. As retrospective programmes of the couple’s work played across the city, he w...
Michel Chion

The Audio-Spectator: An Interview with Michel Chion (Issue 84, September 2017)

Daniel Fairfax
October 2019
Highlights from 20 years of Senses of Cinema
Originally published in Senses of Cinema issue 84, September 2017. One of the world’s foremost theorists of sound in the cinema, former Cahiers du cinéma critic Michel Chion is also a composer of musique con...

Slow History: Cinema and Culture in the 2010s

Daniel Fairfax
October 2019
This is what defined cinema in the 2010s
In his recent book, Clear Bright Future, the British political theorist Paul Mason admits to having recently experienced a moment of uncanny bewilderment. Walking down a UK high street, he was struck by the see...

Political Gestures: Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, by Nico Baumbach

Daniel Fairfax
July 2019
Book Reviews
There is a slight retro effect to the triple-barreled title of Nico Baumbach’s book, with the pair of solidi separating-conjoining the terms “cinema”, “politics” and “philosophy”. Is the writer not harking back...

Children of the Apocalypse: the 2019 Cannes Film Festival

Daniel Fairfax
July 2019
Festival Reports
Picture this, dear reader: from the very beginning of this year’s Cannes film festival, I had been having nightmares about the prospect of getting into the inaugural press screening of Quentin Tarantino’s Once ...

“Godless Mysticism”: An Interview with Amiel Courtin-Wilson

Daniel Fairfax
March 2019
Interviews
One of the things that Australian cinema has for a long time been lacking in is, not to put to a fine a point on it, poetry. But if there is any filmmaker who is striving to change this situation, then it is Am...

The Centre Cannot Hold: the 2019 Berlinale

Daniel Fairfax
March 2019
Festival Reports
In the wake of recent political events that have shaken the four-decade-long neoliberal consensus, sundering the political terrain of the major Western nations into a resurgent far left and an emboldened extrem...

Paul Vecchiali, a Cinematic Franc-Tireur

Daniel Fairfax
October 2018
The Second Generation: French Cinema After the New Wave
Critic at Cahiers du cinéma, filmmaker, globally recognised auteur. The trajectory is a familiar one, particularly for a French cinephile born in 1930, and thus belonging to the same generation as François Truf...
Ash is the Purest White (Jia Zhang-ke, 2018)

Cold Wars: The 2018 Cannes Film Festival

Daniel Fairfax
June 2018
Festival Reports
“Think with your hands.” Godard’s pronouncement – which the attentive viewer may have heard spring from his mouth two or three times before – opens Le Livre d’image (The Image Book), the latest entry in the her...

Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia (Introduction)

Daniel Fairfax
June 2018
Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia
The cinema has always, it seems, been tightly connected with feelings of nostalgia, such that it is not hard to imagine a film-goer in the early 20th century pining for the lost past of the mid-1890s. With the ...

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...
cinema and the museum

Cinema and the Museum: Introduction

Daniel Fairfax
March 2018
Cinema and the Museum
Since roughly the early 1980s, we have lived through a grand mutation in visual culture, one that has accompanied the socio-political transformations wrought by nearly four decades of global neoliberal capitali...
Hamlet

1964: Hamlet (Grigori Kozintsev)

Daniel Fairfax
December 2017
100 Years of Soviet Cinema
Adapting the Cinema to Shakespeare: Hamlet (Grigori Kozintsev, 1964) It is perhaps a measure of the state of Soviet film culture in the Khrushchev era that the country’s highest grossing film of 1964 was a 140...
Film History as Media Archaeology

The Obsolescence of Poetics: Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema by Thomas Elsaesser

Daniel Fairfax
December 2017
Book Reviews
Should a space alien come down to Earth and ask for guidance on the state of film and media studies, I could hardly think of better advice for this inquisitive extraterrestrial than to consult Thomas Elsaesser’...
Sergei Eisenstein

100 Years of Soviet Cinema: Introduction

Daniel Fairfax
December 2017
100 Years of Soviet Cinema
There is a provocative dimension, perhaps, in the title of this dossier: one hundred years of Soviet cinema? How is this possible, if the USSR itself, as a geopolitical entity, only lasted seven decades, before...
Michel Chion

The Audio-Spectator: An Interview with Michel Chion

Daniel Fairfax
September 2017
Feature Articles
One of the world’s foremost theorists of sound in the cinema, former Cahiers du cinéma critic Michel Chion is also a composer of musique concrète and a filmmaker in his own right. His books of film theory inclu...
Jean-Paul Sartre

Models of the Public Intellectual: Cinema and Engagement in Sartre and Godard

Daniel Fairfax
September 2017
Sartre at the Movies
In the last fifteen years, no less than three biographies have been dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard. Of the three, Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard from 2008 is indisputabl...
Cannes 2017

What is the Cinema?: The 2017 Cannes Film Festival

Daniel Fairfax
June 2017
Festival Reports
Cannes, as we all know, is essentially a scandal-making machine. More than any other film festival, Cannes has had controversy baked into its DNA from the very beginning of its now 70-year history, and it somet...
Contemporary Cinema Studies

Contemporary Cinema Studies: A Discipline with a Future? (Introduction)

Daniel Fairfax
June 2017
Contemporary Cinema Studies: A Discipline with a Future?
The cinema is in crisis, and it has been since 1895. This is only partly a joke. Louis Lumière mythically remarked that the cinema was “an invention without a future” soon after the first public screenings of t...
Jacques Aumont interview

The Experience of a Gaze Held in Time: Interview with Jacques Aumont

Daniel Fairfax
June 2017
Contemporary Cinema Studies: A Discipline with a Future?
One of the doyens of French film studies, Jacques Aumont began as a critic at Cahiers du cinéma under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni. After leaving Cahiers, he moved into academia, with his dissert...
Daech Comolli

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 ...
Francesco Casetti interview

The Cinema is a Bad Object: Interview with Francesco Casetti

Daniel Fairfax
June 2017
Contemporary Cinema Studies: A Discipline with a Future?
One of the Young Turks of semiotic film theory in the 1970s, counting Umberto Eco and Christian Metz among his mentors, Francesco Casetti established himself as a major figure in the field of film studies in It...

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