Issue 55

Letter from Nile Southern on his father, Terry Southern's, contribution to Easy Rider. And, Bernard Eisenschitz's letter alerts us to more of value on Eric Rohmer.

On the evidence of this absorbing and articulate interview alone, Dominik Graf is worthy of being better know outside the borders of the German speaking world. He not only offers insights into his own filmmaking practice and aesthetic, but also a range of fascinating observations covering the last forty or so years of German cinema and cultural history.

With a long and distinguished body of writing to his name, Thomas Elsaesser is justly recognised as one of the foremost film historians and critical theorists of his generation. Drehli Robnik examines the rich tapestry of ideas that informs his work.

An apartment, several women, and much angst make up the elements to one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most alluring and contentious films.

The DVD Men of Israel has put gay porn magnate Michael Lucas on the map in a major way, and as Max Cavitch argues, “It’s a DVD that tempts viewers to peer across the porn/non-porn audience divide precisely because it rivets attention to other kinds of boundaries—especially those that define the contemporary Middle East and the lives of its sexual minorities and of gay men in particular.”

Essentially a film about failure, Arthur Penn’s 1975 film comes closest to best capturing the haunting malaise that descended on post-Watergate America. Bruce Jackson takes a fresh look at a detective film without ultimate answers.

Ironically enough, Louise Brooks’ real fame arrived many years after abandoning her acting career. Robert Farmer analyses the life, the films and the screen persona of an actress who was turned into an icon of modernity.

What is the particular dynamic at play in films featuring movie-going? Adrian Danks explores the film-within-a-film mode in range of movies, everything from Sullivan’s Travels to Vivre sa vie and more.

A few issues back Senses published Tag Gallagher’s exhaustive career study of producer/director/actor Francis Ford. Picking up the thread, Charles Barr offers a discussion on his acting roles in brother John’s films.

Jane Mills makes a number of telling observations about some shared traits between the art of maps and the cinema, and furthermore, dissects the narrative, cultural and ideological function of the many maps in Baz Luhrman’s film.

As I flipped through the book Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals (1) on my flight to Argentina, the unofficial testimony for BAFICI – the Buenos Aires Festi...

If one measures a national cinema in numbers and percentages, then 2009 was an annus mirabilis for Germany. Not only were admissions and box office up...

To retain only the word cinema, without an adjective. – Edouard Waintrop, Director of the Fribourg International Film Festival (FIFF) (1) This pocke...

The 2010 edition of Tokyo’s Image Forum Festival once again coincided with the series of Japanese national holidays collectively known as “Golden Week...

The 11th edition of the Jeonju International Film Festival, held from late April to early May 2010, was the farewell one for chief programmer Jung Soo...

Loosely defined as “all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream”, orphan works include educational, ethnographic, government, experimenta...

At a slot in the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival program called Porchlight: True Stories From the Frontiers of International Filmmaking...

Handsome Men and Narrative Holes – Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl (US Dramatic Competition) The best thing you could say about the Opening...

Since the mid-1970s, Clint Eastwood’s life and career have provided material for innumerable books, documentaries and magazine articles. While writers...

“Some strange destiny”, John Thompson claims in The Cinema Book, “seems to have determined that the cinema is written about in France with superior pe...

There have always been earnest concerns for the relevance and representativeness of the Australian cinema: over the past few decades since feature pro...

It is difficult to overstate the impact the British journal Screen has had on the discipline of film and television studies. For the past 50 years, th...

Following the quasi-documentary Konkurs (Audition, 1964), Cerný Petr (Black Peter) marked the feature debut of Milos Forman, the most famous, arguably...

Aleksandr Sokurov’s Dni zatmeniya (Days of the Eclipse) “centres” on Dmitry Malyanov (Alexei Ananishnov), a Russian doctor sent to an isolated village...

Alonzo de Monçado: “When a powerful agency is thus exercised on us, - when another undertakes to think, feel, and act for us, we are delighted to tran...

Lásky jedné plavovlásky (Loves of a Blonde) is a hybrid film. It brilliantly walks the thin line between bitter and sweet, between understated tragic ...

1988 was a high point in the cultural transformations that exploded under perestroika. The films produced under these new conditions bore the malignan...

Try to imagine an actor other than Jack Nicholson starring in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Gene Hackman? Not randy enough. Paul Newman? Too good-n...

“You have to change your own desires, not the order of the world.” - Maurice Ronet to Alain Delon, La piscine There are the reasons why we love movi...

The first of five novels Patricia Highsmith published about her murderous protagonist Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) begins with the epony...

Visiting foreign observers to the Republic of the United States of America have always been easily taken with its amber waves of grain and purple moun...

Tod Browning is simultaneously one of the most compelling and neglected figures of Hollywood’s silent film era. Such a statement may seem paradoxical ...

Jean-Pierre Melville’s movies have been called distant or abstract, but that’s not quite right. His decorous criminals and dogged policemen ...

The last of what would turn out to be a mere handful of films by this major director, a relatively meagre opus which nevertheless houses some of the...

From its original duration of 70 minutes, sadly, only 18 minutes of The Story of the Kelly Gang remains. Thankfully though, the final spectacular scen...

Mike and Stefani is a neo-realist-style drama influenced, according to Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper (1), by the work of Roberto Rossellini and Robert F...

It’s not as though there was nothing else going on in Australian cinema in the 1970s, but the combination of period piece, eye-catching locations, lit...

Jane Campion has been a dominant force in world cinema for nearly two decades. Shot delicately in black-and-white, A Girl’s Own Story is an early shor...

In 2004, a benchmark was set for Australian filmmaking when writer-director Cate Shortland’s feature debut, Somersault, was chosen for Official Select...

As the landscape teems with the dust of a thousand cattle stampeding towards him, Nullah (Brandon Walters) takes a stand on the edge of a precipice. A...