Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944) Rick Thompson January 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film This article originally appeared in CTEQ: Annotations on Film, no. 1 (1998), published in Metro, no. 113/114 (1998), p. 131. It is reprinted with the ...
Anthems and Illusions: On a Few Shorts By Apichatpong Weerasethakul Brian Darr June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Imagine that every time you went to the movies you had a chance to see your favorite short film, right after the upcoming attractions trailers and bef...
The Strange Beast: Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) Donovan Renn June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film If you're looking for explanations or answers to the mysteries of this beguiling film, the original Thai title might be a clue: Sud pralud. You can he...
His Particle, Somewhere: Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012) Duncan Caillard June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Apichatpong’s father died in 2003, and his ashes were spread in the Mekong. During an interview for this year’s Berlinale, for which the director call...
Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2002) Thomas Moran June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film What does it mean to sign off a letter with the phrase blissfully yours? What would it mean to translate an afternoon of bliss into a two-hour film? ...
Worldly Desires (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2005) Darragh O’Donoghue June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film A jungle in Thailand at night, filmed in one long shot. There are the murmurs of nature. Lights flash onto a clearing - the spotlights of a film crew....
Not so unknown after all: Jean Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un inconnu (Autobiography of an Unknown) (Edgardo Cozarinsky, 1983) Jytte Holmqvist June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film A film is not the telling of a dream, but a dream in which we all participate together through a kind of hypnosis, and the slightest breakdown in the ...
Uta onna oboegaki (Notes of an Itinerant Performer, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1941) Andrew Brooks April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film The mood of Hiroshi Shimizu’s Uta onna oboegaki (Notes of an Itinerant Performer, 1941) is marked by an image that is unremarkable in its brevity earl...
I Kiss Your Hand, Madame (Robert Land, 1929) Eloise Ross April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film This lightly sophisticated comedy, indulging in its opportunities at the tail-end of two eras – those of silent cinema, and the Weimar Republic’s Gold...
Shimizu Redivivus: Nakinureta haru no onna yo (A Woman Crying in Spring, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933) Joseph Sgammato April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Among the many differences the widely acknowledged dean of Japanese film scholars in the Anglophone world, Donald Richie, likes to point out between W...
Pit Stop: Billy Wilder’s Mauvaise graine (1934) Adrian Danks April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film The low budget, independently-produced Mauvaise graine (1934) is an outlier in Billy Wilder’s career. Although it characteristically illustrates the v...
“This is You, You Bastards”: Ace in the Hole (1951) Deborah Allison April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Can you take it?” the Paramount publicity ads asked prospective audiences. “Can you stand pulse-pounding suspense? Can you take raw, tense drama? Can...
The Major and The Minor (Billy Wilder, 1942) Karli Lukas April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film An earlier version of this article first appeared in CTEQ: Annotations on Film published in Metro no. 109 (1997): 53-54. After watching several of ...
“She smelled of Tokyo”: Sensory connections in The Masseurs and a Woman (1938) Danica van de Velde April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film A prolific filmmaker who reportedly directed over 150 films between 1924 and 1959, Hiroshi Shimizu has arguably received only a fraction of the critic...
Fourteen’s Good, Eighteen’s Better (Gillian Armstrong, 1980) Ben Kooyman April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Since the success of My Brilliant Career (1979), Gillian Armstrong has become somewhat synonymous with period cinema, an association borne out by her ...
Tôkyô no eiyû (A Hero of Tokyo, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1935) Hayley Scanlon April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film A contemporary of golden age directors such as Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, Hiroshi Shimizu has been intermittently neglected in international ci...
Unfolding Florence – The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst (Gillian Armstrong, 2006) Jytte Holmqvist April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Rich, fascinating, stylish and lush in colour, Gillian Armstrong’s 2006 documentary Unfolding Florence – The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst (nomina...
Grandeur and Decadence: Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) Wheeler Winston Dixon April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Luchino Visconti’s La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969) is such an outrageously excessive and daring film that one wonders, in retrospect, how Visc...
Gillian Armstrong’s High Tide – A reworking of the Maternal Melodrama Gwendolyn Audrey Foster April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Gillian Armstrong’s High Tide (1987) can be seen as a variant on the maternal melodrama. It centres around the struggles of a teenaged young mother wh...
‘You knew, of course, he was a homosexual’: Dirk Bogarde in Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961) Joanna Di Mattia April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Basil Dearden’s 1961 film, Victim, represents a significant moment in British film history. Released into a world where sex between adult men in the U...
Despair (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978) Martyn Bamber April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s first English language film Despair (1978) is a fascinating entry in his filmography: while it is set in Germany, it is his...
Daddy Nostalgie (Bertrand Tavernier, 1990) Lee Hill April 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film It is tempting to view Daddy Nostalgie (Bertrand Tavernier, 1990), Dirk Bogarde’s last film, as an actor’s swan song or as a great director’s meditati...
Stairways to Paradise: Youssef Chahine and Alexandria…Why? David Melville October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film I’ll build a stairway to paradise With a new step every day. I’m going to get there at any price. Stand aside, I’m on my way! - Georges Guétary, A...
At Home Among Strangers (Свой среди чужих, чужой среди своих, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1974) Darragh O’Donoghue October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film At first it looks like we’re in for a Soviet Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. A group of Red Army soldiers and a young woman on a farm celebrate th...
German Yearnings, East and West: The Sons of Great Bear (Josef Mach, 1966) Donovan Renn October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Right out of the gate, Die Söhne der großen Bärin (The Sons of Great Bear) is confrontational, startling, and something else we can't quite describe. ...
Waiting for Rain: Oppression and Resistance in Youssef Chahine’s The Land (1970) David Heslin October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film 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 p...
Of East and West and High and Low: Lemonade Joe (1964) Cerise Howard October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film It’s not news that the 1960s were an extraordinarily fecund time for cinema in Czechoslovakia; the output of the filmmakers connected to the FAMU-cent...
A Man from the Boulevard des Capucines (Chelovek s bulvara Kaputsinov, Alla Surikova, 1987) Martyn Bamber October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film While the Western is primarily known as an American cinematic institution, this has not stopped other countries from enthusiastically embracing the ge...
Cairo Station (باب الحديد, 1958) Darragh O’Donoghue October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Qinawi, the anti-hero of Youssef Chahine’s international breakthrough, is introduced into the main narrative by indirection. First, the ‘lame’ newspap...
Abbas Kiarostami’s The Traveller (1974) Grant Bromley October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1959, François Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) presented delinquent childhood in a manner that allowed for its lead actor, ...
“An Artist Always Paints His Own Portrait”: Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960) Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1959, just four years before his death from a heart attack, Jean Cocteau knew that his time was running out after years of ill health, opium addict...
Les Enfants Terribles (Jean-Pierre Meville, 1950) Martyn Bamber July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Writing about Les Enfants Terribles in mid-2020 during a global pandemic, it is tempting to draw parallels between the seclusion of real-world citizen...
Between Dreams and Death: Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950) Danica van de Velde July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In Greek mythology, Orpheus is a talented musician who travels to the underworld to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice. Upon entering the realm of the...
Family Matters: Les Parents terribles (Jean Cocteau, 1948) Donovan Renn July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Les Parents terribles begins with hand-drawn animation of a theatre curtain rising to reveal not a stage, or even a wide shot, but a jarring close-up ...
Once Upon a Time…: Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946) Jeremy Carr July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Scrawling the opening credits on a chalkboard, Jean Cocteau begins his 1946 romantic fantasy La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) by immediately...
The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1932) Brad Weismann July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In August of 1963, two months before his death, Jean Cocteau recorded on film a “speech to the year 2000” in which he mused on his creative process. H...
