Welcome to issue 84 of our journal the editors September 2017 Editorial Welcome to Issue 84 of Senses of Cinema, where we proudly once again have the privilege of sharing a range of writing on cinema from around the world, with our focus as always as much on contemporary cinema as ...
“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 ...
Faces, Places: The 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival Joanna Di Mattia September 2017 Festival Reports “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.” This statement, from Billy Wilder’s Hollywood noir, Sunset Boulevard (1950), returned to me time and time aga...
Cinema Ritrovato 2017 Peter Hourigan September 2017 Festival Reports It’s an old postcard view of Bologna, the colonnaded street unchanged since this image was made over a hundred years ago, women in long skirts and par...
Eastern Blooms in Karlovy Vary Carmen Gray September 2017 Festival Reports Ask any tourist what sights struck them in Prague and they’ll more often than not regale you with their bemusement over the Žižkov Television Tower, a...
Fantasia International Film Festival Justine Smith September 2017 Festival Reports As a festival grows in size and prominence, can it continue to maintain its identity? Slowly but surely, the Fantasia International Film Festival in M...
Midnight Sun 2017: The Sodankylä Syndrome Maxim Seleznyov September 2017 Festival Reports What is the Midnight Sun Film Festival, held every year in the northern Lapland town of Sodankylä about? It is when you exit the Lapinsuu cinema in th...
The Locarno Film Festival is dead, Long Live the Locarno Festival: The 70th Locarno (Film) Festival Jaimey Fisher September 2017 Festival Reports On the seventieth anniversary of the Locarno Film Festival, the festival reinvented, or, rather, reintroduced itself in several intriguing ways. Much ...
The Political Prism: the 20th Shanghai International Film Festival Zhaoyu Zhu September 2017 Festival Reports The Shanghai International Film Festival’s gigantic size and its globalised focus are not only revealed in the fact that more than 1500 sessions of 50...
Davies, Terence Joanna Di Mattia August 2017 Great Directors b. 10 November 1945, Liverpool, UK d. 7 October 2023, Mistley, UK “Only Through Time Time is Conquered” Early in Of Time and the City (2008), Tere...
A life with no story: Eric Rohmer: A Biography, by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe Tamara Tracz September 2017 Book Reviews One hundred and twenty-seven pages into this substantial biography of Eric Rohmer, Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, having described their subject’s...
Sceptical Oscillations: Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy, by Matthew Abbott Tony McKibbin September 2017 Book Reviews Abbas Kiarostami would seem to make films that suggest philosophical enquiry. But, in his fine book, Matthew Abbott makes clear that the philosophical...
Towards a History of Visceral Cinema: Flesh and Excess: On Underground Film, by Jack Sargeant Giuliano Vivaldi September 2017 Book Reviews Jack Sargeant’s latest book Flesh and Excess: On Underground Film is, as he says in the introduction to the volume, a return to, or re-articulation of...
Bresson in the Marketplace: The Invention of Robert Bresson, by Colin Burnett Hayashi Umineko September 2017 Book Reviews When François Truffaut wrote “Une crise d’ambition du cinéma francais” (1955) in his characteristically inflammatory tone, he was reacting against dir...
“Whose place is this?”: The Architecture of David Lynch, by Richard Martin Troy Michael Bordun September 2017 Book Reviews Richard Martin’s The Architecture of David Lynch arrived just ahead of the director’s return to television. The reviews of Season 3 of Twin Peaks (201...
An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990) Isabella McNeill September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Tackling the often-troublesome act of linking ‘the artist’ with unstable mental health is not a unique notion in art or life, but Jane Campion’s An An...
In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2003) David Evan Richard September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Glossing Jane Campion’s narrative, thematic, and aesthetic interests, Kathleen McHugh writes that in “crafting visual stories drawn from genres that a...
The Matroyshka Doll of Laughter and Uncertainty: Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada (2016) José Sarmiento-Hinojosa September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In his previous, massively underrated and virtually unseen film Trois exercices d’interprétation (Three Exercises of Interpretation, 2013), Cristi Pui...
An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (Jane Campion, 1982) Faith Everard September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “This was my first film. I knew these people who all had red hair and were part of the family. They were also alike in character, extreme and stubbo...
The Heart Asks Pleasure First: Economies of Touch and Desire in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) Joanna Di Mattia September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Touch creates its own language. In The Piano (1993), Jane Campion’s gorgeous, Gothic romance, it speaks multiple dialects. Campion gives us access to ...
Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009) Holly Willis September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Over a black screen, birds chirp in the near distance. The dulcet chords of a cello begin to sound, embellished by a woman’s voice moving joyfully thr...
Girlhood in Reverse – Jane Campion’s 2 Friends (1986) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Fearless, ruthlessly economical and deeply felt, 2 Friends (1986), Jane Campion’s first feature – actually made for Australian television, and clockin...
Work-for-Hire Juvenilia: After Hours (Jane Campion, 1984) Ben Kooyman September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Jane Campion’s After Hours (1984) was developed in partnership with the Women’s Film Unit of Film Australia. This is a virtually forgotten entry in Ca...
The Water Diary (Jane Campion, 2006) Jytte Holmqvist September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Acclaimed Wellington-born New Zealand filmmaker Dame Jane Campion once stated that she “would love to see more women directors because they represent ...
Between Innocence and Adulthood: Telling A Girl’s Own Story (Jane Campion, 1983) Nathan Senn September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Jane Campion’s final student film made at the Australian Film & Television School (now called the Australian Film, Television and Radio School), A...
Passionless Moments (Jane Campion, 1984) Tanya Farley September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film There are one million moments in your neighbourhood, but as the filmmakers discovered, each has a fragile presence which fades almost as it forms. ...
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) Rahul Hamid September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Cristi Puiu’s first feature, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, put the Romanian New Wave on the international map, winning Cannes’ Un Certain Regard prize i...
Off the Road Again: Stuff and Dough (Cristi Puiu, 2001) Kenta McGrath September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film It wasn’t until Cristi Puiu’s breakthrough second feature The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Moartea domnului Lãzãrescu, 2005) and a remarkable string of suc...
Opaque Atrocity: Aurora (Cristi Puiu, 2010) Adam Powell September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) was emblematic in the late nineties as a European auteur product rallying against the evils of homogeneous Hollywo...
The Matroyshka Doll of Laughter and Uncertainty: Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada (2016) José Sarmiento-Hinojosa September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In his previous, massively underrated and virtually unseen film Trois exercices d’interprétation (Three Exercises of Interpretation, 2013), Cristi Pui...
Cigarettes and Coffee (Cristi Puiu, 2004) Alina Haliliuc September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Cigarettes and Coffee is one of the first Romanian films to have received international recognition, as the 2004 winner of the Golden Bear for Best Sh...
The Light on the Chemical Plant: Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949) Adrian Danks September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The careers of Raoul Walsh and James Cagney were never quite the same after White Heat (1949). As various commentators have suggested, this propulsive...
California Dreamin’: High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941) Luke Goodsell September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Guys like you and Johnny Dillinger,” goes the famous line from Raoul Walsh’s exhilarating gangster classic High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941), “are just...
The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939) James L. Neibaur September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Roaring Twenties opens with three men on the battlefield during World War I. James Cagney is Eddie Bartlett, a working-class type doing his best ...
They Drive By Night (Raoul Walsh, 1940) Stephen Gaunson September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Half social-realist drama about truckers, half women’s genre melodrama about a neurotic rich wife who murders her husband and makes a play for anothe...
Regeneration (1915): Raoul Walsh Begins Shari Kizirian September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Made the year exhibitor William Fox established himself as a moviemaker, Regeneration (Raoul Walsh, 1915) was released as part of the company’s ambiti...
The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924) Darragh O’Donoghue September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Hardened fans of the action movie often deplore the inclusion of a love story. It disrupts the narrative, they protest, and is only driven by commerc...
Don’t Let The Bastards Win: Daryl Dellora’s Mr Neal is Entitled to Be an Agitator (1991) James Waters September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Preface: In mid-September 2017, reports resurfaced of Lionel Murphy’s alleged corruption from his time as Attorney-General under Gough Whitlam’s prime...
History Lessons (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1972) Luke Aspell September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film In History Lessons (Geschichtsunterricht), a young man drives in modern Rome, and interviews four ancient Romans – a banker, a peasant, a jurist and a...
The Jorn Utzon Debacle: The Edge of the Possible (Daryl Dellora 1998) Flora Georgiou September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The panoramic montage of the opening shots of the Sydney Opera House and its gleaming concrete shells contrasted against the blue sky are monumental. ...
The Language of Design: Harry Seidler: Modernist (Daryl Dellora, 2016) Rhiannon Dalglish September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film Premiering at the Australian embassy in Paris on 7 September 2016, Harry Seidler: Modernist (Daryl Dellora, 2016) documents the life of an architect b...
Sicilia! (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1999) Pasquale Iannone September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The most famous work by Siracusa-born Elio Vittorini, Conversations in Sicily (1941) tells the story of Silvestro Ferrauto, a Sicilian living in Milan...
Othon (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1969) Sarah Jane Foster September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “To call a work obscure is just as disastrous as to call it a masterpiece of clarity: the text becomes burdened with a prejudice that prevents the rea...
Blowing Up the Past: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Not Reconciled (1965) David Heslin September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Opposition – a strange word, I don’t like it at all; it is such a grim reminder of times that I thought were over and done with.” At a time in which...
A Life Lived for Art: The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1968) Wheeler Winston Dixon September 2017 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is a film almost unlike any other. Starring classical harpsichord...
Christian Petzold: A Dossier Jaimey Fisher and Marco Abel September 2017 Christian Petzold: A Dossier Who is Petzold? If one were to pose this eponymous question – a self-evident one at the start of this Dossier on the German director Christian Petzold – the year 2016 might help bring an answer into notably sh...
Moving Portraits: Christian Petzold and The Art of Portraiture Jasmin Krakenberg September 2017 Christian Petzold: A Dossier While most filmmakers use movement as their primary currency, Christian Petzold seems to favors stasis. In Petzold scholarship, movement has received a fair amount of attention. One undertheorized aspect is thi...
“A Place without Parents”: Queer and Maternal Desire in the Films of Christian Petzold Joy Castro September 2017 Christian Petzold: A Dossier The essay discloses Petzold's interest in the ways in which the planned obsolescence integral to regimes of neoliberal production and consumption is inscribed onto the function of the female body within a heter...
“The Protestant Method” Christoph Hochhäusler September 2017 Christian Petzold: A Dossier Christian. A popular name for people of his generation. The competitive ambition to make a name for himself is a defining feature. He has curly hair, black Medusa-snakes for which, as someone who has rather blo...
“Das ist vorbei”: Untimely Encounters with Neoliberalism in Christian Petzold’s dffb Student Films Marco Abel September 2017 Christian Petzold: A Dossier Harun (Farocki’s) premise was the insight that we do not even have any new images of capitalism yet. Sure, we have these airport boarding zones, where we see modern people with laptops, reading high-gloss magaz...
Ghosts and their Prices: Surveillance and Image Economies in Christian Petzold’s Cinema William Mahan September 2017 Christian Petzold: A Dossier This essay examines Christian Petzold’s lesser-known, early films of the 90s in their depiction of the German economy’s impact on individuals’ image-perception and then takes up his better-known film Die innere...
No Time Like the Present: The Edges of the World in Christian Petzold’s Barbara Brad Prager September 2017 Christian Petzold: A Dossier The source for Christian Petzold’s Barbara (2012) is generally taken to be Hermann Broch’s novella Barbara (1936), with which it indeed shares some similarities, yet the film’s plot and themes closely parallel ...
The Cinema is a Warehouse of Memory: A Conversation Among Christian Petzold, Robert Fischer, and Jaimey Fisher Jaimey Fisher and Robert Fischer September 2017 Christian Petzold: A Dossier Translated by Jaimey Fisher This conversation among writer/director Christian Petzold, senior programmer Robert Fischer, and Prof. Jaimey Fisher of University of California, Davis was part of the “Filmmaker Li...
The Texture of History: Petzold’s Barbara and The Lives of Others Roger Cook September 2017 Christian Petzold: A Dossier The essay examines how Petzold evokes an embodied mode of spectatorship as part of a strategy to counter the approach to history taken by von Donnersmarck. Critics have observed that Petzold’s first historical ...
Petzold’s Phoenix, Fassbinder’s Maria Braun, and the Melodramatic Archaeology of the Rubble Past Jaimey Fisher September 2017 Christian Petzold: A Dossier The Benjaminian Writings on the Wall and Petzold’s Archaeology of Genre In an early scene in Christian Petzold’s 2015 Phoenix, protagonist Nelly Lenz lies in a hospital bed as her friend Lene Winter lists fami...
Before The Battle of Algiers: Sartre, Colonialism, Industrial Cinema, and an Unmade Film Luca Peretti September 2017 Sartre at the Movies “I am not afraid of the war in Algeria. I am not afraid of decolonisation” Like many other companies, the national oil company of Italy, ENI, produced a number of films, particularly between the 1950s and the ...
Holidays and the Movies in Sartre’s Imagination Dudley Andrew September 2017 Sartre at the Movies In the early 1930s Jean-Paul Sartre exclaimed that philosophy would get nowhere until it stopped treating images as isolated postcards stored away somewhere inside the brain and occasionally brought out for vie...
Models of the Public Intellectual: Cinema and Engagement in Sartre and Godard Daniel Fairfax September 2017 Sartre at the Movies In the last fifteen years, no less than three biographies have been dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard. Of the three, Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard from 2008 is indisputabl...
