Author David Heslin

Al-ard (The Land, Youssef Chahine, 1970) begins and ends in the dirt. In its opening sequence, a hand is seen patting the soil around a young cotton plant before gently plucking a few leaves. In the final shot,...

In the 1970s, French film was in a post-revolutionary phase. Not only had the work of the Cahiers du cinema acolytes and their Left Bank contemporaries over the previous decade made the country’s output a short...

In the film that bears her name, Countess Dolingen is on screen for less than a minute. She lies dead on a slab; then, as thunder rumbles and lightning flares, she rises and begins to sing. What we see in this ...

Of all of the inanimate paraphernalia in my life, the thing that I treasure more than any other is effectively weightless. It is, in one sense, a geometric construction, composed solely of criss-crossing horizo...

Of all the films to have faced censorship battles in the English-speaking world, there are few as apparently innocuous as Alice au Pays des Merveilles (Alice in Wonderland, Lou Bunin, Dallas Bower and Marc Maur...

“Opposition – a strange word, I don’t like it at all; it is such a grim reminder of times that I thought were over and done with.” At a time in which notions of middle ground and political equilibrium have onc...

“Pals, I don’t like it in football when it’s 6-0 or 5-1. That’s no drama. What I like is when the result’s 6-5 or 4-4 – in short, when the better team loses the match of a lifetime, in which they fail to conver...

“Unhappiness is a form of renouncement; it has nothing to do with disgrace. She is the most torrid of lovers, and for her we’ll sacrifice everything.” Fifty years after he first filmed the daily activities of ...

It’s difficult to think of a harder film to sell than Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971). Over 12 hours long and devoid of an easily describable plot, Out 1 has spent nearly half a century as an el...

No outside figure has contributed more to the cinema of francophone West Africa than Jean Rouch. Yet, much as he devoted his life's work to subverting the power dynamics of the anthropological gaze, his influen...

The final film I see at the 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival is Aleksei German’s Under Electric Clouds, a collection of gloomy vignettes set in a pre-apocalyptic Russia. Yes, I think you could call it...

“I had a funny dream: I turned on the TV set, and sat down in a chair. I tied myself to it. Then, suddenly, a scary movie came on. I couldn’t get away. I couldn’t turn off the TV. I couldn’t close my eyes, eith...

Show me what mysteries the universe doth hold, Even to the vaulted heavens; Show me all the suns, Shimmering like snowy flakes; All the secrets that comprise creation In infinite space and time. (1) The...

“More welcome is slander to the pious soul than odious eulogies.” (1) Is the ascetic a paragon of humanity, or a self-indulgent masochist? This is the question Luis Buñuel, great Spanish Surrealist and provocat...