Traumatising the floating space of desire: how hotel spaces locate the painful passion of dislocated lives Nashuyuan Wang May 2022 Feature Articles The hotel space is one of the most uncanny products of the modern world. On the one hand, it accommodates leave and stay, transit and temporary spatia...
The Experimental Propagandist: Frank Capra and the Shape of Truth Richard Sowada January 2022 Feature Articles At first pass, placing Frank Capra into the position of a major figure in the experimental and avant-garde continuum may seem counter intuitive in the...
Heil Darling: a story of lips that haven’t laughed Pablo Gonçalo January 2022 Feature Articles Billy Wilder in the ‘30s In 1938, Billy Wilder was 32 years old and had been in America for five years. Born to a family of Polish Jews in the Austro...
The Night Shift: Woman as Outlaw Hero in The Man I Love Rob Nixon January 2022 Feature Articles How do you approach a Classic Hollywood character like Petey Brown? She solves everyone’s problems, slaps men around and disarms them – physically and...
Smooth Digital Reveries: On Proto-Vaporwave and The Flying Luna Clipper Dechlan Cochran January 2022 Feature Articles There are countless films that peddle in the reification of dreams, and countless filmmakers for whom that is their primary mode. From David Lynch’s p...
Promising Young Woman and the cinematic renegotiation of gender in rape-revenge Joy McEntee January 2022 Feature Articles This article was peer reviewed. Introduction How do we keep the past alive without becoming its prisoner? How do we forget it without risking its r...
Streaming paracinema: Charles Band, Full Moon Features and auteurism on third tier SVOD services Andrew Lynch and Alexa Scarlata January 2022 Feature Articles This article was peer reviewed. Introduction On the periphery of the loud and attention-hoarding “streaming wars” playing out between the likes of ...
The Cry: Cinema, Sentiment, Minnelli Murray Pomerance January 2022 Feature Articles The European Magazine for January, 1783, describes as fashionable: Elliott’s Red-Hot Bullets and The Smoke of the Camp of St. Roche. It is manifestly ...
Loss and Absence in Still Life Yiju Huang January 2022 Feature Articles I am most desperate when the shooting is going well. I don’t get anxious when the shooting is not going well, because…it is precisely when I know I am...
Jacob Holdt’s American Pictures: A Note on Style in Poor Cinema J. Ronald Green January 2022 Feature Articles Who says that fictions only and false hair Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty? - George Herbert, Jordan (I), c. 1633 In connection wit...
Looking for Truth: Elia Kazan’s East of Eden and post-Korean War America Mary Hamer January 2022 Feature Articles The talk at the supermarket checkout was all of Sam Mendes’ film 1917 (2019). It had picked up three Oscars, just the night before. “Why it did, I...
The Journey: Peter Watkins’s Polyphonic Plea for Humanity Jacob Hovind January 2022 Feature Articles Famed in increasingly small cinephiliac circles as one of the great firebrands of film history, Peter Watkins’s singular reputation rests on his unaba...
No Exit: Monte Hellman’s The Shooting Anand Sudha January 2022 Feature Articles From one angle, as Phillip Strick’s Sight and Sound review pointed out, The Shooting (Monte Hellman,1966) can be viewed as a classic revenge Western w...
After the Storm: National Cinema in Myanmar Krathyn White January 2022 Feature Articles Prior to the military coup in Myanmar on 1 February 2021, a new wave of fiercely independent productions emerged to challenge the political and social...
The Hired Hand: Peter Fonda’s Mystical, Poetic Western 50 Years Later Mark Lager January 2022 Feature Articles As Bruce Langhorne (who composed the music for Peter Fonda’s directorial debut The Hired Hand) said, “Nobody at Universal knew what to do with it. The...
Bigger than life, or stranger: Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela: Part I Thomas Austin January 2022 Feature Articles Vitalina Varela (2019) is the seventh feature film by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. It tells the true story of a woman from Cape Verde who trav...
Hard Times are Over: Saidin Salkic’s The Last Days of Loneliness Fiona Villella January 2022 Feature Articles Over the last couple of years, the pandemic has forced us to consider the impact of loneliness and to consider just how important others are in our li...
Occupied Territory and Abolitionist Freeze Frames: Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama David Grundy July 2021 Feature Articles A matter of miles from Hollywood but a world away lies Watts, Los Angeles. As Thom Andersen observes in Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003): “The 1965 Wat...
The Black And White Epic No Budget Digital Feature Film Rob Nilsson July 2021 Feature Articles When I think about contemporary American cinema there are things to be thankful for and, as with cell phone addiction and social media mania, a good d...
A Cocktail of Lunacy and Love: Poetic Dimensions in Fabrice Du Welz’s “Ardennes” Trilogy Peter Verstraten July 2021 Feature Articles After a modest attempt to create a national film industry in bilingual Belgium had run aground in the 1950s, Belgian cinema was split into two separat...
Collectif Jeune Cinéma at 50: A Subjective Conversation Raphaël Bassan, Théo Deliyannis and Viviane Vagh July 2021 Feature Articles In the midst of the present devastating economic and social planetary pandemic, the Collectif Jeune Cinéma (CJC) is celebrating its 50th anniversary o...
Favouritism In The Field of Vision: Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite Cam Scott July 2021 Feature Articles Few are so beholden to normalcy as the provocateur. Whether satirically or advantageously, the transgressor fanatically attests to the strength of a m...
Too Soon, Too Late: The Temporality of Ecological Grief in Cinema Kasia Van Schaik July 2021 Feature Articles “Do you burst into tears at the mere mention of the shrinking Amazon rainforests?” the article I’m scrolling through over breakfast wants to know. “Do...
Relative Truth: The Truth and Invented Memories Linda Ehrlich July 2021 Feature Articles Molly Haskell describes La Vérité (The Truth, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2019) as “an anxious and lyrical family drama,” noting how it presents “the way in wh...
A Boundless Experience: Mark La Rosa’s Boundless David King July 2021 Feature Articles There is the kind of cinema which reassures people that the world is as they prefer to think it is. That there is some kind of meaning and sense to li...
Dreams of Italy’s Past: Giuseppe Rotunno’s Cinematography in Amarcord and The Leopard Mark Lager May 2021 Feature Articles Giuseppe Rotunno (born March 19, 1923) passed away at the age of 97 on February 7, 2021. Rotunno was a cinematographer whose eye for the frame was esp...
George Romero’s Zombie Movies: The Fragmentation of America Robert Alpert May 2021 Feature Articles George Romero reimagined the zombie movie when he co-wrote and directed Night of the Living Dead (1968). This was certainly not the first movie about ...
Boy with Flag and Black British experience in Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs and McQueen’s Red, White and Blue Thomas Austin May 2021 Feature Articles Vanley Burke’s photograph Boy with Flag, Winford in Handsworth Park, 1970 appears in films by two of the most important figures in British cinema of t...
“Cinematic Comrades”: Bong Joon-ho’s Auteurism and Song Kang-ho’s Performance Nandana Bose May 2021 Feature Articles “For filmmakers, it’s simple, we just want to work with great actors and Song Kang-ho is such a great actor that it’s fearful how good he is…” Bong J...
Luis Buñuel’s El in the Face of Cultural Appropriation and the #MeToo Movement: A Filmmaker’s Reappraisal Salvador Carrasco May 2021 Feature Articles To my daughter Cassandra Before the first consumer-grade videotapes came out in the mid-1970s, it stands to reason that movies were not that readil...
Reclaiming the Warsaw Mermaids: Female Agency in ‘80s Communist Poland and The Lure Jessica Hudson May 2021 Feature Articles According to legend, a mermaid once surfaced in the Vistula river and was captured by a traveling merchant. When she sang out in distress, a group of ...
Listening Across Difference: Feminist Conversation, Sisterhood, and the ‘70s Irene Lusztig May 2021 Feature Articles “This magazine is not meant to preach to the converted – it’s for everyone,” editor Mary Peacock grandly announced to the L.A. Times in a 1971 article...
Deserted: Notes on J.P. Sniadecki and Lisa Malloy’s Speculative Borderlands Documentary A Shape of Things to Come Jay Kuehner May 2021 Feature Articles It begins with a landscape. The cinematic depictions of the Sonoran desert in El Mar La Mar (2017) and A Shape of Things to Come (2020), both co-direc...
The Ontology of Windows and Cinema in the Pandemic: e-flux and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen’s Film Series 2020 Shekhar Deshpande May 2021 Feature Articles WHOEVER leads a solitary life and yet now and then wants to attach himself somewhere….. he will not be able to manage for long without a window lookin...
Baron Lands: Environmental Upheaval and the Texas Oil Movie Adam Wyatt May 2021 Feature Articles The first gusher in Texas erupted over Spindletop, Beaumont in 1901 and took prospectors and engineers two full days to cap. By day ten, Spindletop pr...
Criminals Against Decoration: Modernism as a Heist Andy Reischling October 2020 Feature Articles The first thing you see in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1966 film, Le Samouraï, is an apartment. It’s a bare studio, undecorated and almost wholly bereft of...