Author Daniel Fairfax

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...