Declaration of War: the 2024 Berlinale Daniel Fairfax May 2024 Festival Reports In the years – decades even, or so it sometimes feels – that I have been dashing off these festival reports, I have never put pen to paper in a state of such explosive rage as I do now, when trying to formulate...
Sweet Madness: the 2023 Berlinale Daniel Fairfax May 2023 Festival Reports Reader, sometimes it feels like I have been penning film festival reports for an eternity – and not just because of the distension of durée that we have all felt since the days of lockdown. And yet, if I look b...
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...
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...
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: 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...
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...
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’...
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...
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...
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...
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: 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...
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...