Issue 101: Welcome to Bollywood the editors May 2022 Editorial After 101 Issues and 23 years of publications, Senses of Cinema takes a deep dive into Indian popular cinema, the world’s largest film industry: Bollywood. While Bombay cinema is generally ignored by critics in...
Coincidence and catastrophe: the unsettling cinema of Manmohan Desai Darragh O’Donoghue May 2022 Bollywood b. 26 February 1937, Bombay, British India d. 1 March 1994, Bombay, India ‘No event of any importance in India is complete without a goof-up’ - Ram...
Dream Girls Under a Different Moon: The Hidden Melancholy of Yash Chopra Films McKenzie Clarke May 2022 Bollywood Chandni kuch kaha/raat ne kuch suna. . Soft blue moonlight enters a room awaft in billowing curtains, the full moon’s face gently pushes aside a sheer...
The Self and the Other: Racialisation of the Northeastern Region Anushka Chaudhuri May 2022 Bollywood Violence plays an integral role for post-colonial nations. However, violence is not always as explicit as a revolution or military intervention. Its m...
Modi’s Bollywood: How ‘Social Message’ Films Amplify the Indian Government’s Policies Uttaran Das Gupta May 2022 Bollywood On April 16, 2022, violence broke out between the Hindu and Muslim communities on the outskirts of the northern Indian city Roorkee. The Hindus claime...
The Caste Blindness of Bollywood NRI Genre Films Dr. Vikrant Kishore May 2022 Bollywood When High Caste Trumps Low Class! In a recent Netflix series Decoupled (Hardik Mehta, 2022), high profile, upper class/caste couple Arya Iyer (R. Mad...
Why You Don’t Leave? Bandra English and its Sources in Love Per Square Foot Claire Cowie May 2022 Bollywood Love per Square Foot (Anand Tiwari, 2018), “Bollywood’s debut on Netflix” , is a romantic film with Mumbai as love object. The opening credits are a m...
A Devdas For Every Generation Jaymini Mistry May 2022 Bollywood Devdas is an epic semi-autobiographical Bengali novella written by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. The novel was written in 1901, though was not publishe...
An Ominous Shade of Crimson: Anurag Kashyap’s Gulaal Karthick Ram Manoharan May 2022 Bollywood Anurag Kashyap is Bollywood’s enfant terrible. The release of his first film Paanch (2003) was prevented by the Indian censors owing to its violent co...
Indian Cinemas, Bollywood and the World Clelia Clini May 2022 Bollywood 2010: it’s a cold March afternoon and a group of secondary school students is gathered to watch My Name is Khan (Karan Johar, 2010). The atmosphere is...
Only the Brave-Hearted Will Take the Bride: Bollywood and Western Cinephilia Darragh O’Donoghue May 2015 Bollywood Bombay cinema was my first film passion – starting with the Hindi film records our Indian neighbour constantly played when I was a child in late-1970s...
Lights, Camera, Nation-State! Bollywood’s choreography of India’s national public consciousness Srishti Chatterjee May 2015 Bollywood Almost universally in the postcolonial world, the patriotic film genre is loved and makes money. Nationalism, indeed, is an entertainment favourite - ...
Bigger than life, or stranger: Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela: Part II Thomas Austin May 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...
Fire Machines: Titane and the Pyrotechnics of Love Emmalea Russo May 2022 Feature Articles “…it shall be revealed by fire.” - Corinthians 3:13 “If our aim is to explore the farthest potentialities of being, we may well opt for the disorder...
Cringing Violently: Reparative Watching, Phenomenology and Discomfort in Australian Cinema Caitlin Wilson May 2022 Feature Articles The seminal Australian film Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) opens with a sweeping, circular pan around a desert landscape. It begins in silence, b...
Deleuzian Rumblings: Residue by Desire Machine Collective Vedant Srinivas May 2022 Feature Articles Desire Machine Collective (DMC) is a collaboration between artists Mriganka Madhukaillya and Sonal Jain, based in Assam (India). Inspired by the writi...
Acts of Faith: On Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021) Peter Verstraten May 2022 Feature Articles Several reviewers have described Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021) as a lesbian nunsploitation drama. Reports about the film, which had its world premi...
‘Is The Power of the Dog a New Zealand film? National Identity, Genre and Jane Campion’ Alfio Leotta & Missy Molloy May 2022 Feature Articles The Power of the Dog premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 2, 2021. In a short time, however, much has already been written about writer-...
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...
Human is only human when vulnerable: An Interview With Michel Franco Savina Petkova May 2022 Interviews In less than 20 years, writer-director Michel Franco has carved a niche for himself in the more austere parts of world cinema. The Mexican filmmaker h...
‘I Was Taunting the Western’: An Interview with Alejandra Márquez Abella Gerd Gemünden & Silvia Spitta May 2022 Interviews In February of this year, the third feature by Alejandra Márquez Abella, El norte sobre el vacío (Northern Skies over Empty Space), celebrated its pre...
“The Act of Filming is an Inner and Physical Journey in Itself”: Interview with Helke Misselwitz Victor Paz May 2022 Interviews Play-Doc International Film Festival has been taking place every spring for 18 years in the charming medieval town of Tui (Spain). The event shows onl...
Information as a music video, comedy as a diagram: Beny Wagner & Sasha Litvintseva in conversation Madeleine Collier May 2022 Interviews Beny Wagner and Sasha Litvintseva are fascinated by perception’s role in shaping history. Their last film, A Demonstration (2020), used the bifurcated...
Interview with Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley Nolan Kelly May 2022 Interviews Independent American cinema is defined by the exigencies of its fundraising. In the shadow of the world’s largest entertainment industry – whose succe...
The Creative Leap to Fluid Consciousness: An Encounter with Ashley McKenzie Brigitta Wagner May 2022 Interviews In Corona’s third winter, it was hard to care about cinema as one should. The kind of cinema that requires one’s physical presence in theatres and at ...
An Interview with Danny Lyon Elizabeth Dexter May 2022 Interviews Born in New York in 1942 to German and Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Danny Lyon has always taken photographs. In the late ‘60s, after a life lived...
Closing the Gap Between Self and Self: A Conversation with Nina Menkes Paulo B. Menezes May 2022 Interviews Tel Aviv, Israel, 2016. It is hotter than it is supposed to according to the weather bulletin. A taxi ride to Jaffa, the old port part of the city, di...
Day by Day: IFFR 2022 Madeleine Collier May 2022 Festival Reports The 51st edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam was among the first of many this year to be pushed online by the materialisation of the ...
Stuck in traffic: IFFR 2022 Tara Judah May 2022 Festival Reports On his early evening drive home from work (he leaves just after 5pm every day), Andrew Rakowski, the Melbourne lawyer who serves as protagonist in Dav...
Absence and Presence at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. 68. Tara Judah May 2022 Festival Reports I was searching for a word to describe my specific feelings of loneliness when I came across mauerbauertraurigkeit, which the internet tells me is Ger...
From Within the Umbra of History: A Few Things about the Films of Rainer Komers, Sohrab Hura and Sylvia Schedelbauer Anuj Malhotra May 2022 Festival Reports A study of three profiled filmmakers at the recently concluded, 68th edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and the distinct str...
Film Goes On (?): The 23rd Jeonju International Film Festival Marc Raymond May 2022 Festival Reports This year’s 23rd edition of the Jeonju International Film Festival returned to full capacity for the first time since 2019, following a 2020 cancellat...
Play-Doc 2022: António Campos, a secret filmmaker Ricardo Vieira Lisboa May 2022 Festival Reports Translated by Cristina Río López Between 4 and 8 May, in Tui (a Galician town near the Portuguese border) the most recent edition of the documentar...
70 Years of Mountain Cinema: The 2022 Trento Film Festival Maria San Filippo May 2022 Festival Reports If unaware, as I was, that there’s a film festival devoted exclusively to mountain cinema, much less that it’s in its venerable 70th year, this and ot...
Rings of Saturn, Gardens of Empire: The 2022 Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra Jay Kuehner May 2022 Festival Reports At Punto de Vista (The International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra) it seems there are no margins, no outliers; that the notion of the marginal...
Smith, Jack: Travails of an Underground Artist Sanya Osha May 2022 Great Directors b. 14 November, 1932, Columbus, Ohio, USA d. 18 September, 1989, New York, New York, USA Artists who choose to pursue counter-paradigmatic work ofte...
Desai, Manmohan Darragh O’Donoghue May 2022 Great Directors b. 26 February 1937, Bombay, British India d. 1 March 1994, Bombay, India ‘No event of any importance in India is complete without a goof-up’ - R...
Lansbury, Angela Joy McEntee May 2022 Great Actors b. October 16, 1925, London, England. “When I take power, they will be pulled down and ground into dirt for what they did to you. And what they did i...
Caine, Michael Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2022 Great Actors b. March, 18, 1933, London “I'll always be around because I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.” – M...
Garbo, Greta Jeremy Carr May 2022 Great Actors b. 18 September 1905, Stockholm, Sweden d. 15 April 1990, New York City, U.S. “What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.” ...
Magee, Patrick Mark Lager May 2022 Great Actors b. 31 March 1922 Armagh, Northern Ireland d. 14 August 1982 London, England Patrick Magee was born one hundred years ago (exactly two weeks after St...
How to Do Things with Camera Movement: The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera, by Daniel Morgan Kyle Barrowman May 2022 Book Reviews To say that a book devoted to analysing camera movement is an exemplary instance of ordinary language philosophy may raise a few eyebrows. Indeed, it ...
Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949): The Insanity of Romantic Desire Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film “There is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” – ...
The Grotesque Loves of Jealousy, Italian Style (Ettore Scola, 1970) Tiia Kelly May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film A florist named Adelaide (Monica Vitti) sits behind a concave glass window, quietly observing something we cannot see. She’s handed a drink by the wea...
A Geography of Fractured Desire: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962) Danica van de Velde May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) opens rather enigmatically with the fatigued denouement of the relationship between the film’s ...
Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) Boyd van Hoeij May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964) was the Italian filmmaker’s first feature in colour. This might seem like a major change ...
‘You Can’t Make an Omelette…’ – Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey, 1966) and the Art of Breaking Eggs David Melville May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film “We must try to be more conspicuous!” - Monica Vitti, Modesty Blaise A typical scene in Modesty Blaise (Joseph Losey, 1966) takes place in a hip Am...
Fritz Lang’s Spione (1928) Shari Kizirian May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film It begins like any good spy thriller should, with a fast-paced action-filled set up, here done in a style so clipped and cryptic it leaves us breathle...
An entertainment: Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear (1944) Andréas Giannopoulos May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Graham Greene’s 1943 novel The Ministry of Fear – a “wrong man” story set during the London Blitz in which a recently institutionalised person acciden...
Out of the Shadows: Cloak and Dagger (Fritz Lang, 1946) Ian Olney May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Fritz Lang’s Cloak and Dagger (1946) is a far more interesting film than its middling reputation suggests. A spy story about an American physicist rec...
“A pin for me ’at”: Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (1941) Adrian Danks May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Man Hunt is the first of a string of four bold anti-Nazi films – along with Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944) and Cloak and Dagger (19...
Fritz Lang in America: While the City Sleeps (1956) Wheeler Winston Dixon May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Fritz Lang’s penultimate American film, While the City Sleeps (1956), is a serial killer drama, much like Lang’s classic film M (1931). Robert Manners...
M (Fritz Lang, 1931) Digby Houghton May 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film Fritz Lang’s M (1931) is a cry for despair representing the dying moments of a free Germany before the reign of terror was concentrated under Adolf Hi...
The value of reproduction and the reproduction of value: Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010) Anders Furze March 2022 CTEQ Annotations on Film “In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in a particular place. It i...
