“The absolute and ultimate manifestation of the power of the mind over technology”: Gaspar Noé talks 2001: a Space Odyssey Pip Chodorov and Jeremi Szaniawski June 2018 Feature Articles This interview was conducted in person by Pip Chodorov, with additional questions by Jeremi Szaniawski, at the Cannes Grand Hotel, 18 May 2018. It was...
The Dionysian Stage of 2018: Interview with Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt Daniel Fairfax June 2018 Feature Articles 2018 is a World Cup year, so it is only to be expected that football-themed films will proliferate. None, however, are likely to be anywhere near as d...
“A Very YES, AND Person”: An Interview with Emma-Kate Croghan Doosie Morris June 2018 Feature Articles In 1995 faux-fur coats and matte lipstick were a big thing, Café Rumbarellas was on Brunswick Street and Australians still had a discernible accent. ...
Virtually Present, Physically Invisible: Virtual reality immersion and emersion in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena Adriano D'Aloia June 2018 Feature Articles The freezing cement stings my heels while, in total solitude, I find myself looking at a pair of sneakers, abandoned beneath a shiny metal bench. The ...
“Why do you need me to tell you all the secrets?”: An Interview with Denis Côté Tomáš Hudák June 2018 Feature Articles French-Canadian auteur Denis Côté is probably best known for his Best Directing prizes at Locarno for his films Elle veut le chaos (All That She Wants...
The Embrace of the Serpent and the dark legacy of the rubber holocaust Mauricio Rivera June 2018 Feature Articles Like Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), The Embrace of the Serpent, directed by Colombian director Ciro Guerra (2015), may at first sight b...
Some thoughts on the erotic aesthetic in Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Desire Trilogy’ Joanna Di Mattia March 2018 Feature Articles Desire is a wish; a risk; a hunger. Desire starts with an arousal that then becomes a yearning. It alters our perception and changes our molecules. To...
“A Film is a Synthesis”: An Interview with Ventura Pons Jytte Holmqvist March 2018 Feature Articles Highly prolific Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons (born 25 July 1945) sees the world through a cinematic lens. He argues that “a film is based on three e...
Sustaining a Cinema of Modest Means: An Interview with Ted Fendt, Ricky D’Ambrose and Graham Swon Brigitta Wagner March 2018 Feature Articles Despite the controversy surrounding Dieter Kosslick’s imminent departure after a long tenure as director of the Berlin International Film Festival and...
Le Fidèle as a Postmodern Love Romance: The Flemish Crime Dramas of Michaël R. Roskam Peter Verstraten March 2018 Feature Articles Because of the almost insurmountable linguistic barrier between Flemish in Flanders and French in Wallonia, the history of twentieth-century Belgian c...
“Somehow Images are the Perfect Words”: An Interview with Amat Escalante Kristy Matheson March 2018 Feature Articles “There’s a square there, there is a world that you create inside there where anything can happen. You can create all these emotions and tell a story a...
“A Democracy of Images” John Gianvito in Conversation Thomas Austin March 2018 Feature Articles Slow-paced but urgent, John Gianvito’s incendiary nine-hour diptych For Example, The Philippines is a stunning feat of political filmmaking. Emotional...
Le Goût du crime: Notes on Gangster Style in New-Wave Paris: Part II Murray Pomerance March 2018 Feature Articles In the second instalment of his two-part article, Canadian film scholar and regular Senses of Cinema contributor Murray Pomerance continues his though...
What Would Siegfried Kracauer Say About Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals? Jennifer Ruth March 2018 Feature Articles This article focuses primarily on Nocturnal Animals, arguing that like movies such as The Blue Angel and M, Nocturnal Animals gives creative expressi...
“I Love Vulnerability”: An Interview with Tab Hunter Andrew J. Rausch December 2017 Feature Articles A 2003 New York Times article described 1950s matinee idol Tab Hunter as having “Malibu beach boy looks”, and that description is apt. Even today, wel...
Ouroboros and the Cycle of Violence: An Interview with Basma Alsharif Justine Smith December 2017 Feature Articles Ouroboros (2017), the feature debut of visual artist Basma Alsharif, begins with an extended drone shot from the ocean through Gaza that plays in reve...
Haptically Revisiting Agnès Varda’s Jacquot de Nantes Andrew Northrop December 2017 Feature Articles Drawing on Agnès Varda’s practice of engaging characters dialectically with their environments, I intend to explore how Jacquot de Nantes (1991) and T...
“Women’s Stories Aren’t Told in Laos”: An Interview with Mattie Do Emma Westwood December 2017 Feature Articles When examining great moments in film history, Laos very rarely – if ever – rates a mention. Even though this South East Asian nation found its place v...
The Touch: Bergman’s forgotten masterpiece Gerard Corvin December 2017 Feature Articles Ingmar Bergman died ten years ago in July. At the time, it felt like the passing of a whole era of filmmaking. In its front page devoted to the “Maste...
Phantoms Came to Meet: Guy Maddin’s Seances as Surrealist History of Cinema Andrei Kartashov December 2017 Feature Articles “It is your only chance to see this film”: the opening phrase of Seances is one whose meaning is now all but forgotten. Seances, a video work by Guy M...
Le Goût du crime: Notes on Gangster Style in New-Wave Paris: Part I Murray Pomerance December 2017 Feature Articles In this, the first instalment of a two-part article, Canadian film scholar and regular Senses of Cinema contributor Murray Pomerance presents his thou...
Stopping up the Works: Weir’s The Plumber and Social Class Conflict William “Bill” Blick November 2017 Feature Articles Good plumbing seems to be essential for a happy life or at least as the film, The Plumber (1979), suggests with ironic wit. This film may be seen as p...
“A World that Killed God”: An Interview with Cristi Puiu Andreea Patru September 2017 Feature Articles “The godfather of the Romanian New Wave” is probably the most frequently used phrase to describe Cristi Puiu, the director who seemed to start this w...
Start Spreading the News: Summer of Sam (Spike Lee, 1999) and the ‘70s White Working Class Jackson Arn September 2017 Feature Articles On a warm August night in 1977, detectives arrested a man outside his apartment building, located an hour north of New York City. Even with two guns p...
“I Reach Out My Hand and What Do I Feel?”: Thematising Digitisation in Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis James Slaymaker September 2017 Feature Articles By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it had become abundantly clear that digital methods of cinematography and distribution had eclipse...
“The Vitagraph Girl” or “The Girl From Sheepshead Bay”?: Florence Turner Constructed as an Everywoman Matinee Idol David Morton September 2017 Feature Articles This article sets out to trace the progression of early silent film star Florence Turner from that of an every-woman matinee idol found in her early p...
A Telephone Interview with Elena Anaya, Barajas Airport, Madrid, 21 July 2017 Jytte Holmqvist September 2017 Feature Articles Spanish actress Elena Anaya is nothing short of impressive. Since the inception of a career that took off in earnest in 1996 with her role in the film...
Spectacles of Death: Body Horror, Affect and Visual Culture in the Mexican Narco Wars César Albarrán-Torres September 2017 Feature Articles This article offers an overview of the highly mediatized nature of the current phase of the Mexican narco wars, highlighting the existence of explicit...
The Audio-Spectator: An Interview with Michel Chion Daniel Fairfax September 2017 Feature Articles 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 concrète and ...
Blow Guns: Escapist Erotics in Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012) Lilia Kilburn June 2017 Feature Articles In 2016, armed libertarians, disgruntled by the U.S. public government’s management of federal lands, began an occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National...
In the Cells of Fortress Europe: An Interview with Marianna Economou, director of The Longest Run Thomas Austin June 2017 Feature Articles Marianna Economou’s observational documentary The Longest Run (2015) tells the story of two teenage refugees, Kurds from Syria and Iraq, who meet in a...
Shame and Revenge in Elle’s Paris and The Salesman’s Tehran Kaveh Bassiri June 2017 Feature Articles The 2016 Cannes Film Festival closed with screenings of Asghar Farhadi’s Forushande (The Salesman, 2016) and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016), which were ...
The Explorer: An Interview with Teddy Williams Iván Zgaib June 2017 Feature Articles Eduardo Teddy Williams’ figure was reflected in the shining tiles of the hotel. It was a grey November day and the smell of the rough sea flooded the ...
I Learned to Depend on Me: On Whitney Houston and Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016) Ivan Kreilkamp June 2017 Feature Articles The 1985 video for Whitney Houston’s version of “Greatest Love of All” is now – after Houston’s years of alleged abuse in her marriage with Bobby Brow...
The Empathy Engine: VR Documentary and Deep Connection Si Mitchell June 2017 Feature Articles “It is a factory of mental illness,” says the voice of a young man weary beyond his years. We turn and scan the hard-white walls. We are in a cell at ...
Fortunate Sinners: Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone as an ‘Edam’ Western Peter Verstraten June 2017 Feature Articles Between 1999 and 2008, the Dutch director Martin Koolhoven made eight feature films, none like any of the others. In 2005 he shot the multicultural ro...