Welcome to issue 82 of our journal the editors March 2017 Editorial Welcome to Issue 82 of Senses of Cinema. To begin 2017, we decided to celebrate films that turn 50 this year in a bumper dossier we've simply titled 1967: Love Letters. As the title indicates, this is not an at...
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...
Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival Carmen Gray March 2017 Festival Reports The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, named for the winter darkness that cloaks the capital at that time of year, held its 20th edition last Novembe...
The Worthy and the Great: The 2017 Berlinale Daniel Fairfax March 2017 Festival Reports There are two ways of judging the merits of films: those that are worthy, and those that are great (I will momentarily leave to one side what a philos...
International Film Festival Rotterdam: Bread and Mirrors Carmen Gray March 2017 Festival Reports To shape a schedule that hits on the best of the 500 titles in Rotterdam’s jammed program depends on a combination of good tips, luck and intuition. W...
Lost in Politics: the 3rd Berlin Critics’ Week Philip Cartelli March 2017 Festival Reports Creating a new film festival in the same time and place as one of the world’s most venerable and large cinematic celebrations may seem like a futile t...
Vancouver 2016: The Daughters Generation Bérénice Reynaud March 2017 Festival Reports Penelope, gone Pedro Almodóvar’ense Julieta was felicitously at home at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) – as the character is based ...
A Few Notes on German Cinema at the 67th Berlin Film Festival Marco Abel March 2017 Festival Reports Towards the end of the 67th iteration of the Berlin International Film Festival, one of Germany’s best contemporary directors, Dominik Graf, showcased...
Sundance 2017 Bérénice Reynaud March 2017 Festival Reports Not at Home Having, in the past, expressed my contentment at attending Sundance, I feel entitled, this year, to introduce a slight drawback in my com...
AFI FEST: A View from the Freeway Bérénice Reynaud March 2017 Festival Reports In the fall 2016, US film festivals on the West Coast had the foresight, the clout and the good luck to uncover some significant gold nuggets: Telluri...
Mar del Plata Confidential Celluloid Liberation Front March 2017 Festival Reports to Fidel, until forever... A sense of self-referential irrelevance may assail the consummate festival-goer inhabiting a world of films few outside th...
Hopper, Dennis Joanna Elena Batsakis March 2017 Great Directors 17 May, 1936, Dodge City, Kansas 29 May 2010, Venice, Los Angeles On October 8 1963, a young actor named Dennis Hopper attended the first retrospect...
Duvivier, Julien Ben McCann March 2017 Great Directors 8 October 1896, Lille 29 October 1967, Paris “If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Julien D...
Pons, Ventura Jytte Holmqvist March 2017 Great Directors July 25, 1945, Barcelona, Spain In a contemporary Spain that has seen Pedro Almodóvar leave his impressive mark on the cinematic horizon (his most re...
Other Criteria: Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (eds.) Swagato Chakravorty March 2017 Book Reviews Edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer, Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice comprises a series of reflections by an impressive sel...
Concrete Passages: Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement, by Saige Walton John Edmond March 2017 Book Reviews The merits of Saige Walton’s Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement lie in the parallels between baroque thinking and...
Revisiting Film Ontology: Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory, by Victor Fan Hiu M. Chan March 2017 Book Reviews Victor Fan’s Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory encourages a concept that has been long forgotten in studies of aesthetics and f...
All Boxed Up: Barton Fink (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991) Adrian Danks March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Barton Fink (1991), the Coen brothers’ fourth feature, represents a departure from their earlier excavations of classical American genre cinema, Blood...
Triple Agent (Éric Rohmer, 2004) Lee Hill March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In the late Harry Mathews’ provocative mix of memoir and fiction, My Life in CIA (2005), a proverbial American in Paris in the 70s, amused by friends’...
Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996) Rodney F. Hill March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film There’s a dark and a troubled side of life… – Ada Blenkhorn and Howard Entwisle, “Keep on the Sunny Side” (1899) The opening line of the standard Am...
No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007) Rahul Hamid March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film No Country for Old Men is the Coen Brothers’ most celebrated film. It won the brothers three Academy Awards: best picture, director, and adapted scree...
Raising Arizona (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1987) Martyn Bamber March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Coen Brothers’ filmography can be broadly split into two strands: the serious works such as Blood Simple (1984), Fargo (1996) and No Country for O...
Safety Last! (Fred Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1923) James L. Neibaur March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Safety Last! is likely the quintessential Harold Lloyd film, the one that seems to define his entire career, and the one that identifies him as chiefl...
In Defence of A River Called Titas (Ritwik Ghatak, 1973) Parichay Patra March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Ghatak’s women rarely confront his uncannily mobile camera in Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Called Titas, 1973), they suffer patiently, are violently...
Modernist Realism: Redes (Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel, 1936) Nace Zavrl March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film For all its central importance and stature in the history of Golden Age Mexican cinema, Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel’s Redes (The Wave, 1936...
The Philosophy of Mitchum: Fatal Poet in Where Danger Lives (John Farrow, 1950) Joanna Elena Batsakis March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1978, the American actress Deborah Kerr described her close friend and frequent collaborator Robert Mitchum as “…a far more complex person than his...
Hard Times (1975): Walter Hill’s Bareknuckle Ballad Adam Powell March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Peter Biskind’s sensationalist bestseller Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) paints the picture of the great but crumbling Hollywood institution at the ...
Perceval le Gallois (Éric Rohmer, 1978): Channeling Chrétien de Troyes Through Cinema Leah Anderst March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Following the success of his Six Moral Tales, Éric Rohmer turned his attention backward into history, and with Perceval, to one of the earliest narrat...
Images of Femininity: Catherine de Heilbronn (Éric Rohmer, 1980) Cody Lang March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film After a string of intelligent modern romance movies beginning in the mid-sixties and continuing into the seventies, Éric Rohmer made three period piec...
Die Marquise von O… (La Marquise d’O…, The Marquise of O, Éric Rohmer, 1976) Darragh O’Donoghue March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “-“ “The remarkable dash”, as Éric Rohmer called it. A simple grammatical break becomes the rupture in which an “unspeakable” and “unthinkable” crim...
“Take Me As I Am”: Robert Mitchum’s Contradictory Masculinity in Home from the Hill (1960) Joanna Di Mattia March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Captain Wade Hunnicutt (Robert Mitchum) is introduced to us as a man of action. Out hunting, he crouches in the reeds waiting to take aim at the ducks...
Why Worry? (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor 1923) Brad Weismann March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Why Worry? marks a major transition point in the life of its star, Harold Lloyd. In the wake of the success of his 1922 breakthrough feature Grandma’s...
Straight Shooting: Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit (2010) Tanner Tafelski March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film True Grit (2010) sticks out in Joel and Ethan Coen’s body of work. It’s a black sheep. They leech the film of irony and nihilism. They dial down their...
Late Style: The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon, 2007) Xanthe Ashburner March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Éric Rohmer’s last film is a rare thing: an enthusiastic engagement with literary pastoral at its most mannered. Particularly in its Renaissance itera...
Bitumen Music: Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978) John Edmond March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film A long shot is of the human body in full view, a medium from torso up, a close-up the face or equivalent part. Humanly derived, these delineations buc...
The Freshman (Sam Taylor and Fred Newmeyer, 1925) Luke Aspell March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In preparation for his arrival at Tate University, Harold Lamb (Harold Lloyd) has seen “The College Hero” six times, carefully rehearsing the jig and ...
Applause Please (Ivan Gaal, 1975) Tanya Farley March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1956 television arrived in Australia, so too did Hungarian refugee Ivan Gaal. Fast-forward twenty years, Gaal was a photographer and filmmaker e...
Scenes from a Revolution: Éric Rohmer’s L’Anglaise et le Duc (The Lady and The Duke, 2001) Wheeler Winston Dixon March 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film For most of his long career, Éric Rohmer created a series of ‘moral investigations’ that were resolutely spare and enigmatic in their construction, de...
Story of Women (Une affaire de femmes, 1988) Darragh O’Donoghue February 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1957, two young critics from Cahiers de cinéma published a study of Alfred Hitchcock, drawing attention to the artistic and moral complexity of a f...
Pre-Code Women: Dorothy Arzner’s Working Girls (1931) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster February 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Nearly forty years after her death in 1979, Dorothy Arzner remains one of the most fascinating American filmmakers to work within the Hollywood studio...
The Wild Party (Dorothy Arzner, 1929) Luke Aspell February 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Wild Party was the first talkie for both star Clara Bow and director Dorothy Arzner, and is noted in the technical history of the early sound peri...
Kicking Over the Traces: Dorothy Arzner’s Merrily We Go To Hell (1932) Wheeler Winston Dixon February 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film When the cinema was first invented, women were responsible for some of the major breakthroughs in the medium, and often advanced to the director’s cha...
The Avoidance of Love: The Piano Teacher (2001) as Anti-Melodrama Alison Taylor February 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1991, Isabelle Huppert starred in Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary, a film that charts the fall of Gustave Flaubert’s tragic heroine. Emma’s idealist...
Two Ordinary People; One Special Day Gwendolyn Audrey Foster January 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “From childhood, history was a subject that fascinated me, and what I kept wondering was how everyday life might have been different, if Caesar or Mu...
Laughing at Him and With Him: Marcello Mastroianni in Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana, 1961) Joanna Di Mattia January 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Pietro Germi’s satire of Sicilian machismo, Divorce Italian Style, unfolds within the stifling walls of a decaying palace in Agramonte, a town of “slo...
Big Deal on Madonna Street (I soliti ignoti, Mario Monicelli, 1958) Darragh O’Donoghue January 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Big Deal on Madonna Street is such a great, catchy, and memorable title that you would hate to lose it. It was the third (at least) tried out by the f...
Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland – Luchino Visconti and White Nights David Melville January 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “You feel as if your dreams were alive and you could touch them – and real life just passes you by!” - Marcello Mastroianni to Maria Schell, Le notti...
“A Fantastic, Enchanted Ballet”: Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) Wheeler Winston Dixon January 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film With the enormous worldwide success of his film La Dolce Vita (1960), Federico Fellini consolidated his reputation as a filmmaker of the first rank. N...
White Material Marcin Wisniewski June 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film One could say that sound has always featured as an important element in the work of Claire Denis. Her 1999 Beau travail is a choreographed dance set t...
Dance, Girl, Dance Louise Cole October 2004 CTEQ Annotations on Film Dance, Girl, Dance (1940 USA 89 mins) Source: NFVLS Prod Co: RKO Prod: Eric Pommer, Harry E. Edington Dir: Dorothy Arzner Scr: Tess Slesinger, ...
1967: Love Letters the editors March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 Editorial It has been 50 years since 1967 and it struck us at Senses of Cinema that not only was this a notable anniversary, but that it also made fo...
In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967) Joanna Di Mattia March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 Sidney Poitier’s Dignified Touch in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night We hear Detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) speak very few words in...
A Degree of Murder (Mord und Totschlag, Volker Schlöndorff, 1967) Alexandra Heller-Nicholas March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 Volker Schlöndorff’s 1979 adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum remains even by contemporary standards one of the most harrowing German...
Accident (Joseph Losey, 1967) Dean Brandum March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 “I felt annoyed. I could not remember being in love. That pain. Defencelessness. I thought – We wish their destruction” – Nicholas Mosley, Accident (1...
La Collectionneuse (Éric Rohmer, 1967) Maura Edmond March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 You could be forgiven for thinking Eric Rohmer’s first film cycle, the ‘Six Moral Tales’ included six different moral tales. It doesn’t. In each film ...
Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967) Alexia Kannas March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 Existential Dread and the Smell of Boiling Rice: A Love Letter to Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967) Hanada Goro (Shishido Joe), Tokyo’s “No. 3 as...
Privilege (Peter Watkins, 1967) Luke Goodsell March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 “Smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now.” – The Youngbloods, “Get Together” “I hate you! I hate you! I ha...
Six Men Getting Sick (David Lynch, 1967) Anton Bitel March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 (H)e(r)metic Art Ad Nauseam: David Lynch's Six Men Getting Sick (1967) Part of our makeup as social animals is that certain of our activities, when ...
Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967) Sandra E. Lim March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 Revisiting Playtime’s Style of Comic Democracy Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967) is the third of four films based on the character of Monsieur Hulot (Jac...
The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967) David Surman March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 Old Men and Animal Dreamers: The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967) The production of feature animated films emerged from a series of risky gamb...
This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver, José Mojica Marins, 1967) Kat Ellinger March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 Coffin Joe: cultural icon, counter-cultural statement, sadistic lord of carnival horror. Once seen, rarely forgotten, often underappreciated, Zé do Ca...
Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, 1967) Rachel Brown March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 “Don’t Tell Them Everything”: Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, 1967) 9pm Saturday, December 3rd 1966: shooting begins on A Portrait of Jason. 9am S...
The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) Mark Freeman March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 The year 1967 was significant in cinema history, and if you’re trying to make sense of why, you don’t have to look much further than Mike Nichols’ The...
Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) Daniel Fairfax March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 End of Story, End of Cinema: Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend was released in Paris on December 29, 1967, capping a calendar...
Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967) Alexandra Heller-Nicholas March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 That Candy Box of Vulgarity: Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967) Upon the fifty-year anniversary of the release of Jacqueline Susann’s bestsellin...
Echoes of Silence (Peter Emanuel Goldman, 1967) Michael Ewins March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 Of all the “kitchen-sink, dirty-bed-linen, bad-complexion movie-makers” in the New American Cinema Group, a “self-help organization” that included Shi...
Reflections in a Golden Eye (John Huston, 1967) Justine Smith March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 Infused with an almost classical reverence for romanticism, the unfolding emotions and narratives at the heart of John Huston’s work always seemed tie...
From the Drain (David Cronenberg, 1967) Emma Westwood March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 “Cronenberg’s first ‘unpredictable peak’ emerges in his student film, From the Drain. An organic military weapon kills a soldier, throwing into questi...
The Whisperers (Bryan Forbes, 1967) Julien Allen March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 “Critics are very impressed by camera movement and what have you, but audiences are impressed by performance.” – Bryan Forbes To those familiar with ...
Blow-Up (Michael Antonioni, 1966) Simon Weaving March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 Fifty years ago, on 12 May 1967, the Jury of the Cannes Film Festival awarded its top prize to Blow-Up, Michael Antonioni’s first English language fil...
Movements: Filmmaker Interviews the editors March 2017 Movements: Filmmaker Interviews This issue we are proud to include a number of interviews with filmmakers from around the world, practicing within a range of different cultural and i...
The New Extremism in the Street of Comedy: An Interview with Bruno Dumont Amir Ganjavie March 2017 Movements: Filmmaker Interviews By 2016 Bruno Dumont had directed nine feature films ranging from realist to experimental works. His major preoccupations in these movies were racism,...
“Empathy is Always a Much-Needed Quality”: An Interview with Filmmaker/Educator Rachel Perkins Isabella McNeill March 2017 Movements: Filmmaker Interviews Born in Canberra in 1970, Australian filmmaker Rachel Perkins grew up in the beating heart of Australia’s Indigenous civil rights movement, an experie...
“Inspiration is More Important Than Experience”: An Interview with Jaime Rosales Tomáš Hudák March 2017 Movements: Filmmaker Interviews When we held retrospective of Jaime Rosales’ work at Cinematik Film Festival in Piešťany, Slovakia in September 2015 and gave him carte blanche to pic...
“Even If You Have Nothing, You Should Keep Filming”: An Interview with Cheng Yu-Chieh on Wawa No Cidal (2015) Christopher Brown March 2017 Movements: Filmmaker Interviews Cheng Yu-Chieh’s film Wawa No Cidal (2015) relates the story of journalist Panay (Ado Kaliting Pacidal), a woman of aboriginal Taiwanese heritage, who...
Intuition and the Search for Deep Emotion: An Interview with Nana & Simon Brigitta Wagner March 2017 Movements: Filmmaker Interviews In order to understand what the collaborative filmmaking couple Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groβ, known simply as Nana & Simon, do so beautifully...
Arab Cinema Through a Narrow Frame: A Conversation with Tala Hadid Kamran Rastegar March 2017 Movements: Filmmaker Interviews Tala Hadid first came to general notice as a filmmaker with her short film, Your Dark Hair, Ihsan (Tes cheveux noirs Ihsan, 2005), which was awarded s...
