“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...
Gone to Earth: The Pagan Pastoral in Powell and Pressburger Samm Deighan May 2017 Feature Articles The host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare; Caolte tossing his burning hair And Niamh calling Away, come away: Empty ...
Cruel Weapons: On the Music Video Collaborations of Bob Dylan and Nash Edgerton Sam Twyford-Moore May 2017 Feature Articles Nash Edgerton, the older brother of Australian film star Joel Edgerton, is primarily known in his country of birth, perhaps, for his early and cheeky ...
An Essential Comeback : Jerzy Skolimowski’s 11 Minutes (2015) Bruce Hodsdon March 2017 Feature Articles The screening of Jerzy Skolimowski's seventeenth feature 11 Minutes (2015) at the 2016 Melbourne International Film Festival, reminded me of a provoca...
“Whose death, whose power?”: Crystal images and the political unconscious in the films of Albert Serra and Alexander Sokurov Jeremi Szaniawski March 2017 Feature Articles Albert Serra’s recent La Mort de Louis XIV (The Death of Louis XIV, 2016), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as the ailing king, has been rightly hailed a ma...
Toshirō Mifune: Between Extravagance and Subtlety Andrea Grunert March 2017 Feature Articles “Without Toshirō Mifune, the films of Akira Kurosawa could never have come into being,” wrote Kurosawa’s longtime script supervisor and principal assi...
1967 and the Creative Destruction of British Cinema’s Viability on Chicago’s Screens Dean Brandum March 2017 Feature Articles Half a century from the moment when British cinema flickered so brightly as to contend on even footing with Hollywood’s most mainstream product in the...
An Interview with Laleen Jayamanne Helen Macallan March 2017 Feature Articles What would cinematic thought be like refracted through the master filmmakers of Asia? In her book The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani, Laleen Jayamanne r...
The Dreamers of La La Land Dan Golding March 2017 Feature Articles With apologies to Pauline Kael: how do you make a happy movie in America without being jumped on? Either America has forgotten how to make uplifting f...
Making Monsters in László Nemes’ Son of Saul Chari Larsson December 2016 Feature Articles Abstract >> But if I must continue to write, to look, to frame, to photograph, to show my pictures and think of all this, it is precisely to re...
A French Connection: Paul Verhoeven’s Elle in Tandem with Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game Peter Verstraten December 2016 Feature Articles Over the course of his long career, the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven has been at the centre of many a success and many a controversy. His second feat...