The Poetry of Light and Dark: Luciano Tovoli and Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) Alexandra Heller-Nicholas December 2015 Feature Articles Luciano Tovoli’s reputation as one of the great Italian cinematographers is commonly framed in reference to his work on Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 ...
Obsessions, Imitations & Subversions, Part Two – on Imitation of Life Tom Ryan December 2015 Feature Articles “It’s not a remake as such, it’s a new take.” Michael Boughen, producer of the TV series, Tomorrow When the War Began The subject here is Imita...
A Tale of Two Suzannes: À nos amours (1983) and Suzanne (2013) Maria San Filippo December 2015 Feature Articles Nominated for a César for Best Original Screenplay, Suzanne (2013) is the second feature film by Ivory Coast-born writer-director Katell Quillévéré, o...
Filming without Predetermined Results: Henner Winckler and the Berlin School Marco Abel December 2015 Feature Articles I think every film ought to be an experiment, without predetermined results. In the fall of 2013, in short succession four books were published ...
Surprised by La Jetée Ned Schantz September 2015 Feature Articles “Once you find a hidden picture, it seems always to have been there staring you in the face” D.A. Miller (1) “One needs to stop looking at the pho...
About Elly, About Jane Ivan Kreilkamp September 2015 Feature Articles Asghar Farhadi’s 2009 film About Elly - only released in the U.S. four years after the triumph of Farhadi’s 2011 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner A Sepa...
Persistent Abstraction: the Animated Works of Max Hattler Dan Torre September 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: 1923 aka Heaven (Max Hattler, 2010) Max Hattler is a German-born animator-filmmaker who has been steadily producing works for well ove...
Being Elizabeth Bishop: Barbara Hammer’s New Documentary on an American Poet Wheeler Winston Dixon September 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Welcome To This House Barbara Hammer’s Welcome to This House: A Film on Elizabeth Bishop (2015) is that rarity among documentary films...
Janus of the Antipodes: An Interview with French-Australian Filmmakers Jayne Amara Ross and Viviane Vagh Raphaël Bassan June 2015 Feature Articles I had the idea to initiate a conversation with two filmmakers from different generations but with similar preoccupations. Two Franco-Australian filmma...
Experimental Cinema: An Interview with Raphaël Bassan Julia Gouin June 2015 Feature Articles Raphaël Bassan has worked as a freelance critic for many journals and magazines in France including Écran, Cinéma différent, La Revue du cinéma, and f...
Glimpses of Life: An interview with Albert Maysles Tom Ryan June 2015 Feature Articles Albert Maysles, who died on March 6 at the age of 88, was an American treasure, a documentary filmmaker for whom anything was a potential subject, sim...
Then and Now: Re-visiting Albert Maysles’ Early Celebrity Portrait Films Tim O’Farrell June 2015 Feature Articles The recent death of Albert Maysles set me reminiscing. I visited him at his spacious midtown Manhattan 54th Street offices in March 2005 while complet...
The Quest for Everyday Utopianism: An Interview with Corneliu Porumboiu Amir Ganjavie June 2015 Feature Articles Six years after receiving the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize for Police, Adjective (Politist, adjectiv), Corneliu Porumbiou returned to Cannes this year...
When Minimalism Meets the Martial Art Tradition: An Interview with Hou Hsiao-hsien Amir Ganjavie June 2015 Feature Articles After an eight-year absence, Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien has boldly returned to feature filmmaking with The Assassin (Nie Yinniang), a Tang dy...
Godard’s Defying Adieu Yvette Biro June 2015 Feature Articles Can one take for granted G’s intention or confession about his adieu? Adieu from what? From everything that personally used to matter so much to him, ...
An Interview with Denis Côté Wheeler Winston Dixon June 2015 Feature Articles Denis Côté is a young Canadian filmmaker who has burst onto the international film scene with a group of challenging and innovative movies in the past...
On Colonialism, Access and Form: A Discussion with Hubert Sauper Lydia Papadimitriou June 2015 Feature Articles France-based Austrian documentary filmmaker Hubert Sauper is not used to retrospectives of his work. But things may soon change, as the critical accla...
Nationalism: On and Off the Screen Moritz Pfeifer June 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014.) For a while it seemed that Cold War cleavages were the last heydays of state approved art consum...
Notes on Bruno Dumont’s P’tit Quinquin, or Something is Rotten in the North of France Philip Cartelli June 2015 Feature Articles I. It’s the first one in the film – what is often dismissively labelled an establishing shot, as though all that it does is to set the stage for some...
Hard Clarity, Vaporous Ambiguity: The Fusion of Realism and Modernism in Antonioni’s early 1960s Films [1] Hamish Ford March 2015 Feature Articles Cinema today should be tied to the truth rather than to logic. And the truth of our daily lives is neither mechanical, conventional nor artificial, as...
Looking at / Looking in Antonioni’s Chung Kuo, Cina: A Critical Reflection Across Three Viewings Dan Edwards March 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Plate spinners at work in Shanghai, 1972, in Antonioni’s Chung kuo, Cina (1972). I want to be there, in that audience in 1972, watchin...
Michelangelo Antonioni: The Truth about The Passenger Theodore Price March 2015 Feature Articles Introductory note: 2015 sees the 40th anniversary of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (aka Profession: Reporter), arguably one of the Italian di...
The Crew: Antonioni’s Australian film that was not to be Antony Sellers March 2015 Feature Articles In 1975 Michelangelo Antonioni had completed his English language trio of films for Italian producer Carlo Ponti and MGM, an unique mainstream contrac...
A Zoomorphic Performance: Joaquin Phoenix in P.T. Anderson’s The Master Daniel Fairfax March 2015 Feature Articles As I sat watching P.T. Anderson’s The Master in an East Village cinema during its theatrical release, a curious thought came over me. In the middle of...
California Dreaming: P.T. Anderson’s Take on Pynchon’s Inherent Vice Rolando Caputo March 2015 Feature Articles “We are interested in the plot of a play or film because it stages a problem whose solution we expect: we are expecting the plot to be resolved. So lo...
Los Angeles Plays Itself: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice Tim O’Farrell March 2015 Feature Articles With Paul Thomas Anderson’s auteur standing complementing Thomas Pynchon’s literary eminence and pop culture savvy, Inherent Vice (2014) promises to b...
The Trip as Mourning Comedy Adam Underwood March 2015 Feature Articles Don't you think everything's melancholic once you get to a certain age? - Rob Brydon (1) he only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it ...
Concrete Vanities: Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups Yaron Dahan March 2015 Feature Articles Vanity is so deeply rooted in man’s heart, that a soldier, a criminal, a cook, or a porter will boast and expect to have admirers, and even philosophe...
The Berlin Critic’s Week: A Discussion with Frédéric Jaeger and Dennis Vetter Yaron Dahan March 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 (dir. Johnnie To) “The Berlinale is not the problem, but only a symptom of German film culture,” announce...
The Art of Citational Cinema: An Interview with Alex Ross Perry Brigitta Wagner March 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Queen of Earth (dir. Alex Ross Perry, 2015) As a historian of German cinema, I used to cringe when people said, “German cinema? Oh, li...
The Bleakness of the Happy Ending: Sirk’s Uncomfortable Comedies Tom Ryan February 2015 Feature Articles Both in Europe and the US, Douglas Sirk’s best-known work was done in the realm of the melodrama, from Zu neuen Ufern (To Distant Shores,1937) to Imit...
Harun Farocki (1944-2014), or Dialectics in Images Thomas Voltzenlogel December 2014 Feature Articles The mirror endows an object with new proportions, studies objects through other objects which are not quite the same. The mirror extends the world: bu...
Corpi e luoghi: Harun Farocki on Pasolini Toni Hildebrandt December 2014 Feature Articles “Do you really know who I was before I met you?” (1) I met Harun Farocki in June 2014 at Princeton. Bernhard Siegert and Nikolaus Wegmann had organis...
Obsessions, Imitations & Subversions, Part One – on Magnificent Obsession Tom Ryan December 2014 Feature Articles In the beginning was the Lloyd C. Douglas novel (1), published in the immediate wake of the 1929 stock market crash, when the author was 52. It was th...
Jill Esmond Olivier: The First Wife Brian McFarlane December 2014 Feature Articles Feature image: Jill Esmond with Laurence Olivier When I was eleven, an Australian schoolboy already besotted with the movies, I saw a film called My ...
A Reply From John Flaus John Flaus December 2014 Feature Articles The Flaus Dossier has overwhelmed me – I am at a loss for words. I know that statement will be met with a measure of doubt by many of those who hav...