Off the Road Again: Stuff and Dough (Cristi Puiu, 2001) Kenta McGrath September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film It wasn’t until Cristi Puiu’s breakthrough second feature The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Moartea domnului Lãzãrescu, 2005) and a remarkable string of suc...
Opaque Atrocity: Aurora (Cristi Puiu, 2010) Adam Powell September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) was emblematic in the late nineties as a European auteur product rallying against the evils of homogeneous Hollywo...
The Matroyshka Doll of Laughter and Uncertainty: Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada (2016) José Sarmiento-Hinojosa September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In his previous, massively underrated and virtually unseen film Trois exercices d’interprétation (Three Exercises of Interpretation, 2013), Cristi Pui...
Cigarettes and Coffee (Cristi Puiu, 2004) Alina Haliliuc September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Cigarettes and Coffee is one of the first Romanian films to have received international recognition, as the 2004 winner of the Golden Bear for Best Sh...
The Light on the Chemical Plant: Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949) Adrian Danks September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The careers of Raoul Walsh and James Cagney were never quite the same after White Heat (1949). As various commentators have suggested, this propulsive...
California Dreamin’: High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941) Luke Goodsell September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Guys like you and Johnny Dillinger,” goes the famous line from Raoul Walsh’s exhilarating gangster classic High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941), “are just...
The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939) James L. Neibaur September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Roaring Twenties opens with three men on the battlefield during World War I. James Cagney is Eddie Bartlett, a working-class type doing his best ...
They Drive By Night (Raoul Walsh, 1940) Stephen Gaunson September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Half social-realist drama about truckers, half women’s genre melodrama about a neurotic rich wife who murders her husband and makes a play for anothe...
Regeneration (1915): Raoul Walsh Begins Shari Kizirian September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Made the year exhibitor William Fox established himself as a moviemaker, Regeneration (Raoul Walsh, 1915) was released as part of the company’s ambiti...
The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924) Darragh O’Donoghue September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Hardened fans of the action movie often deplore the inclusion of a love story. It disrupts the narrative, they protest, and is only driven by commerc...
Don’t Let The Bastards Win: Daryl Dellora’s Mr Neal is Entitled to Be an Agitator (1991) James Waters September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Preface: In mid-September 2017, reports resurfaced of Lionel Murphy’s alleged corruption from his time as Attorney-General under Gough Whitlam’s prime...
History Lessons (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1972) Luke Aspell September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In History Lessons (Geschichtsunterricht), a young man drives in modern Rome, and interviews four ancient Romans – a banker, a peasant, a jurist and a...
The Jorn Utzon Debacle: The Edge of the Possible (Daryl Dellora 1998) Flora Georgiou September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The panoramic montage of the opening shots of the Sydney Opera House and its gleaming concrete shells contrasted against the blue sky are monumental. ...
The Language of Design: Harry Seidler: Modernist (Daryl Dellora, 2016) Rhiannon Dalglish September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Premiering at the Australian embassy in Paris on 7 September 2016, Harry Seidler: Modernist (Daryl Dellora, 2016) documents the life of an architect b...
Sicilia! (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1999) Pasquale Iannone September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The most famous work by Siracusa-born Elio Vittorini, Conversations in Sicily (1941) tells the story of Silvestro Ferrauto, a Sicilian living in Milan...
Othon (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1969) Sarah Jane Foster September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “To call a work obscure is just as disastrous as to call it a masterpiece of clarity: the text becomes burdened with a prejudice that prevents the rea...
Blowing Up the Past: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Not Reconciled (1965) David Heslin September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “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...
A Life Lived for Art: The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1968) Wheeler Winston Dixon September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is a film almost unlike any other. Starring classical harpsichord...
A Woman Asks Why: Maborosi (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1995) Joseph Sgammato June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Maborosi (1995) launched the feature film career of Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda, until then a maker of television documentaries only. Unlike ma...
I Wish (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2011) MaoHui Deng June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Children have always played an important role in the Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda’s films. His career started off with the documentary Lessons f...
How Film Remembers: After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998) Kristi McKim June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film What comprises our favorite memories, and how do we understand our lives in relation? What do we do with these memories, and how do they shape us? Rev...
Still Walking (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008): Continuity in (E)motion Tara Judah June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The English language translation of Aruitemo Aruitemo (Still Walking, Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008) as “Still Walking” offers a subtle and incisive duality ...
Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2004) Kenta McGrath June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai, 2004) is a fictionalisation of an infamous incident from 1988, whereby a mother left her four child...
Cultivating Self in the Other in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Without Memory (1996) Nathan Senn June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The nature of memory is a recurrent theme in the cinema of Hirokazu Kore-eda. Often, it functions as a device to cultivate perspective or structure, a...
Jerking Off the Universe: (Isabelle Huppert and) Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) Annabel Brady-Brown June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Over a five-decade career, Paul Verhoeven has received the Razzie for Worst Film of the Decade (Showgirls, 1995) as well as the Golden Calf for Best D...
Starship Troopers and Plato’s Republic: The Pop Philosophy of Paul Verhoeven Dan Shaw June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film It is a mark of my perspective as a philosopher that what struck me initially about Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997) were its similarities to ...
Zwartboek (Black Book, Paul Verhoeven, 2006) Martyn Bamber June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Zwartboek (Black Book) is a Holland homecoming for director Paul Verhoeven, returning to the Netherlands from the United States after the technically ...
Cinema as Sex on Cocaine: Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) Alexandra Heller-Nicholas June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “No film has ever succeeded in making sex look at once so alluring and so glum. From its opening sequence, the film is a castration fantasy that condu...
Fascism for Liberals: RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987) Christian McCrea June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film When Orion Pictures first sent out promotional material for RoboCop, they would indulge every possible comparison to Terminator (James Cameron, 1984),...
Hauer’d to be a God: Flesh + Blood (Paul Verhoeven, 1985) Luke Goodsell June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Against a verdant, sun-kissed field, a young betrothed couple – the handsome, callow hero and his flaxen-haired princess bride – swoon and banter. “F...
The Ash Heap of Meaning: Juraj Herz’s The Junk Shop (1965) David Heslin June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “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...
Of Beastly Beauties and Beauteous Beasts: Juraj Herz and the Fairy Tale David Melville June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “When you dream about my likeness, you create it. The more ardently you dream, the sooner you will see me. And I will resemble your dream.” - The B...
A Tail and Two Sisters: Morgiana (Juraj Herz, 1972) Rhiannon Dalglish June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1975, cult horror icon Karen Black played two sisters, Millicent and Therese, in a chapter of Dan Curtis’s horror film anthology, Trilogy of Terror...
Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess, Ernst Lubitsch, 1919) Michael Ewins June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Ernst Lubitsch had a nose for class, an ear for wealth, and an eye for sex – so why do we only ever talk about his touch? More than any other in Holly...
Nuanced Complexity: The Marriage Circle (Ernst Lubitsch, 1924) and the Early Days of the ‘Lubitsch Touch’ Isabella McNeill June 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Known for his skilful adaptations of pre-existing novellas and plays (Trouble in Paradise (1932), Ninotchka (1933), The Shop Around the Corner (1940))...
All Boxed Up: Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991) Adrian Danks March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Barton Fink (1991), the Coen brothers’ fourth feature, represents a departure from their earlier excavations of classical American genre cinema, Blood...