Welcome to Issue 90 of our journal the editors March 2019 Editorial Welcome to Issue 90 of Senses of Cinema. Our 90th issue, and the first for 2019, is bountiful, to say the least. Though her cinema output is small (so far), Valérie Massadian is, in our estimation, one of th...
The fluids of Roma: necropolitics and class in Cuarón’s cinematic memoir César Albarrán-Torres March 2019 Feature Articles This article argues that some of the strongest visual and symbolic elements that glue Roma together is the use of fluids as metaphors of racial and cl...
Total Cinema: Or, “What is VR?” Raqi Syed March 2019 Feature Articles In the late 1980s, throughout the ‘90s, and well into the 2000s, MIT Principle Research Scientist, Gloriana Davenport investigated the idea that movie...
“The People Are Missing”: New Refugee Documentaries and Carceral Humanitarianism Joy Castro March 2019 Feature Articles In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze distinguishes between classical political cinema, in which “the people are there, even though they are opp...
Archived Passions, Censored Bodies: Passiflora and the Regulation of Sexuality at the NFB Jonathan Petrychyn and Claudia Sicondolfo March 2019 Feature Articles “With the near simultaneous appearance in Montreal in the summer of 1984 of Michael Jackson and Pope John Paul II, something of a definitive note for ...
After Kubrick (1927-1999): a Cinematic Legacy Jeremi Szaniawski March 2019 Feature Articles “We’re all children of Kubrick, aren’t we? Is there anything you can do that he hasn’t done?” Paul Thomas Anderson Stanley Kubrick (1927-1999) passe...
Four Years of the Nitrate Picture Show, Part 2: The “Silver Screen”, Beautiful Black and White Peter Rist March 2019 Feature Articles In Part 1 of this article, I discussed the history of my own film viewing experiences of cellulose nitrate colour prints. We now move to black and whi...
The Art of Murder: What We Have to Learn from The House That Jack Built Jensen Suther March 2019 Feature Articles I. The reception of Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built (2018) has, in effect, rendered the film nearly impossible to watch. Initial press r...
Under the Moon in Sharjah: The 1st Sharjah Film Platform Carmen Gray March 2019 Festival Reports If you were around in the 1980s and even a passing consumer of Hollywood action movies, you’ll probably remember Chuck Norris as an elite troop facing...
The Unspeakable finds Voice: The 48th International Film Festival Rotterdam Dirk de Bruyn March 2019 Festival Reports The 48th edition of the International Film Festival of Rotterdam was IFFR director Bero Beyer’s fourth iteration. The four program groupings that he i...
The 2018 Mezipatra Queer Film Festival: An Adventure Beyond Reality into a Queer Liminal Space Stuart Richards March 2019 Festival Reports Themes of liminality run through the Mezipatra Queer Film Festival in Prague. The event is held in November each year, as Europe slowly turns to the c...
Questions of Agency: Sundance 2019 Bérénice Reynaud March 2019 Festival Reports The Warden and the Young Man In 2012, Ava DuVernay made history by becoming the first black woman filmmaker to get a major award at Sundance. Since t...
Back to the Wolf Pack: the 22nd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival Leonardo Goi March 2019 Festival Reports “You’ve come prepared,” a member of the guest management team from the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF, in its Estonian acronym) giggled at m...
All the Feels: The 48th International Film Festival Rotterdam Leonardo Goi March 2019 Festival Reports The tote bag I picked up at the headquarters of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) had four fluorescent words printed on it, one for eac...
Thessaloniki International Film Festival: Reflexivity and Realism in the Romanian Retrospective Yaron Dahan March 2019 Festival Reports The Thessaloniki International Film Festival has long had a tradition of foregrounding Balkan cinema through its Balkan Survey. In a retrospective of ...
The Marginal and the Misplaced: To Save and Project: The 16th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation Tanner Tafelski March 2019 Festival Reports In this day and age, to watch an older movie, or really any movie, is to watch a digital copy – a file code made up of ones and zeros. That is to say,...
Rendez-vous in Autumn: China-US Summit/American Film Market/AFI FEST Bérénice Reynaud March 2019 Festival Reports On Oct 30, the day before the American Film Market opened in Santa Monica, the Asian Society of Southern California had organised the US-China Enterta...
“Il faut souffrir”; or, Why the personal was (mostly) not the political at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival Marco Abel March 2019 Festival Reports “Il faut souffrir,” Fritz Lang, playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterful Le mépris (Contempt, 1963), laconically declares to screenwriter Paul J...
The Centre Cannot Hold: the 2019 Berlinale Daniel Fairfax March 2019 Festival Reports In the wake of recent political events that have shaken the four-decade-long neoliberal consensus, sundering the political terrain of the major Wester...
Genre, Women and the Romantic Comedy: An Interview with Elizabeth Sankey Sucheta Chakraborty March 2019 Interviews Elizabeth Sankey’s Romantic Comedy, which recently premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), is a documentary analysing the pitfa...
“It’s Good to Lose Control”: An Interview with Valeska Grisebach Gerd Gemünden March 2019 Interviews Often considered a junior member of the one dozen directors or so associated with the Berlin School, Valeska Grisebach has left, with a mere three fea...
Locarno Interview: Ying Liang and his Family Tour Jaimey Fisher March 2019 Interviews The 71st Locarno (Film) Festival was Carlo Chatrian’s last as artistic director, and it offered an unusually strong Concorso internazionale (Internati...
Recovering the Phantom Limb: An Interview with Jennifer Reeder Brigitta Wagner March 2019 Interviews 2019 was the year that the Berlin International Film Festival wanted us all to know that it takes gender parity seriously. Not only did the festival e...
“Godless Mysticism”: An Interview with Amiel Courtin-Wilson Daniel Fairfax March 2019 Interviews One of the things that Australian cinema has for a long time been lacking in is, not to put to a fine a point on it, poetry. But if there is any filmm...
Klapisch, Cédric Ben McCann March 2019 Great Directors b. 4 September 1961, Neuilly-sur-Seine Filmography Further Reading “All of (Klapisch’s films) are solid mainstream entertainments with sprawl...
del Toro, Guillermo Gabriella Munoz March 2019 Great Directors b. October 1964, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico Films, like books, have the power to change you forever. Watching a movie at the right place and tim...
A Multitude of Meanings: The Long Take: Critical Approaches, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye Nicholas Bugeja March 2019 Book Reviews In the cinema, the long take is an instrument of multifaceted – sometimes paradoxical – power. In a film like Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, Vi...
Revealing the Soul of a Cinematic Passeur: Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982-2016, by Adrian Martin Felicity Chaplin March 2019 Book Reviews Mysteries of Cinema, an anthology of the major essays by prolific and internationally-recognised Australian-born film critic Adrian Martin, takes its ...
“The nascent US movie industry through the prism of the Triangle Film Corporation”: Ainsi naquit Hollywood, by Marc Vernet Jean Paul Simon March 2019 Book Reviews With his last book devoted to the formation of the first cinema studios and to the early beginnings of the organisation of Hollywood, Marc Vernet offe...
The Ontological Truth of Film-as-Philosophy: Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience, by Shawn Loht James Magrini March 2019 Book Reviews Whereas the majority of film-philosophy essays incorporating the thinking of Martin Heidegger are limited to reading specific films from one or anothe...
“A Happy Sense of Solitude”: Exterior Space in The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (Yasujirō Ozu, 1952) Joanna Di Mattia March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1952) appears early in the most lauded period of Yasujirō Ozu’s 35-year career. Inevitably overshadowed by the fil...
Les cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959) Anthony Frajman March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film In many ways, the Nouvelle Vague began with Claude Chabrol. Not only was he instrumental in assisting his Cahiers du Cinéma colleagues’ early producti...
Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955) Rahul Hamid March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film A panting woman hurtles down a highway, wearing only a trenchcoat. A man in a speeding sports car careens toward her: a near collision. Unexpectedly, ...
The Gentle Perfume of Despair: Sans lendemain (Max Ophuls, 1939) David Melville March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film Ever and anon the snow fell, penetrating so profoundly into the depths of her enraptured being that she had no room in her for any other sensation tha...
The Trouble with Money (Max Ophuls, 1936) Darragh O’Donoghue March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film Max Ophuls has been called a humanist director, but if we define humanism as referring to the centrality of human activity to the universe, then he is...
Tender Restraint: Tokyo Twilight (Yasujirō Ozu, 1957) Danica van de Velde March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film A man’s hat left forgotten on a wall hook in a laneway izakaya; a bottle of whisky lit by lamplight on a desk piled with mountains of books; a plume o...
Too Late the Hero (Robert Aldrich, 1970) Brad Weismann March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film Robert Aldrich’s career is a manifest of contradictions. One of the first living directors to be lauded as an auteur, he conscientiously worked his wa...
The Ascent (1977): Larisa Shepitko’s Final Word Shari Kizirian March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film The breathless immediacy of Voskhozhdeniye (The Ascent, Larisa Shepitko, 1977), adapted from a novella by Vasily Bykov about two Belarusian partisans ...
Early Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1956) Martyn Bamber March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film Sōshun (Early Spring, 1956) follows Yasujirō Ozu’s classic Tōkyō monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953) in continuing to develop the director’s characteristic...
Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich, 1954): A “Superwestern” from the Postwar Hollywood Left Sandra E. Lim March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film At the end of the American Civil War and during the height of the Franco–Mexican War, circa 1866, Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster) and Ben Trane (Gary Cooper...
Women as Prey: Les bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film Claude Chabrol is often called the French Hitchcock, but, to my mind, Chabrol is the far more provocative director, because of his brutal honesty abou...
No Angels: Larisa Shepitko’s Wings (1966) Adam Bingham December 2009 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko completed only five features in her tragically short career (she was killed in a car accident in 1979). But eve...
Liebelei (Max Ophuls, 1933) Jesús Cortés May 2006 CTEQ Annotations on Film The first thing that impresses one about Max Ophuls’ Liebelei is its rich simplicity. Based upon a short story by Arthur Schnitzler, it was Ophuls...
“… Only Superficially Superficial”: The Tragedy of Sophistication in Madame de. Adrian Danks March 2003 CTEQ Annotations on Film Ophuls was less interested in real things than in their reflections; he liked to film life indirectly, by 'ricochet.' For example the first treatmen...
La cérémonie (Claude Chabrol, 1995) Julien Lapointe April 2001 CTEQ Annotations on Film Spoiler warning: This review reveals the film's ending, so I urge readers to put it aside till after seeing the film. Released in 1995, Claude Chab...
Announcement: Senses of Cinema-Monash Essay Prize winner the editors March 2019 News We are thrilled to announce the second Senses of Cinema-Monash Essay Prize awarded to the best published work in 2018 by an Australian contributor. This prize has been established in partnership with Monash Uni...
The Tender Force of Valérie Massadian Maura Edmond and John Edmond March 2019 Valérie Massadian and the Aesthetics of Care This project began in Melbourne’s Princes Park. Margot, Maura’s daughter, was ambling about in the sunshine while we discussed Milla, and its recent d...
48.8566° N, 2.3522° E, Winter Solstice 2017 Valérie Massadian March 2019 Valérie Massadian and the Aesthetics of Care The real is leaders whose relationship to the world is only comprised of statistics, figures and data and have lost all sense of reality and humanity ...
Nasty laugh Milla, beautiful Milla Annabel Brady-Brown March 2019 Valérie Massadian and the Aesthetics of Care Realised by the non-professional actor Séverine Jonckeere, Milla is said to be seventeen in the film’s press notes. But without that information her a...
Bressonian Resistance: On Valérie Massadian’s Nana Ela Bittencourt March 2019 Valérie Massadian and the Aesthetics of Care Valérie Massadian’s first feature Nana (2011) revolves around three instances of death. In the first a pig is circled by a farmer, shot, then laid out...
The Body is a Fact Leo Goldsmith March 2019 Valérie Massadian and the Aesthetics of Care A film in two parts. At first, in Mamoushka (2012), we hear a voice but we do not see a body. The voice tells us about the body — it is a body, we lea...
Letter to Kelyna Valérie Massadian March 2019 Valérie Massadian and the Aesthetics of Care St Jean de la Forêt, July 2011 Kelyna, You don't know how to read yet, but you're learning. And as everything you do, you do it with rage. We hav...
Interview with Valérie Massadian: More Feeding, Less Screaming John Edmond and Maura Edmond March 2019 Valérie Massadian and the Aesthetics of Care Valérie Massadian’s charismatic and raw interviews match her work. In this conversation she discusses her background, her approach to reality, and how...
Supreme Instants: Valérie Massadian’s Nana and Milla Michael Sicinski March 2019 Valérie Massadian and the Aesthetics of Care There are no simple passkeys to understanding the cinema of Valérie Massadian, a body of work that is both mysterious and remarkably plainspoken. Othe...
Inventing is Prohibited Luc Chessel March 2019 Valérie Massadian and the Aesthetics of Care Translated by Daniel Fairfax For anyone who, upon watching Valérie Massadian’s Milla (2017), was moved or startled by the film, I wonder what shoul...
Milla and Motherhood Andie Fox March 2019 Valérie Massadian and the Aesthetics of Care The intimacy and intensity of motherhood is rarely depicted in film. Not only because as a subject mothering tends to be sanitised, patronised or redu...
