A World without Cinema the editors April 2020 Editorial In the face of mass death and economic devastation on a worldwide scale, matters of art and entertainment may seem trifling. But the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on the cinema. With theatres shut...
The 21st century plague: Cinema in the age of COVID-19 Wheeler Winston Dixon April 2020 Feature Articles We’ve seen this scenario before, but only in the cinema: a mysterious plague, for which there is no cure, suddenly appears out of nowhere and ravages ...
And Then We Danced: Queer sounds and movement Stuart Richards April 2020 Feature Articles And Then We Danced had its premiere in Georgia on 8th December 2019. I got to first experience this tender film at the Melbourne International Film Fe...
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom as Pasolini’s Film on Film Jeremy Carr April 2020 Feature Articles As a scathing indictment of the violence and debauchery revealed during the fascist reign of 1940s Italy, it is unparalleled. As a grotesquely percept...
The Russian Doll and Skripov the Spy: ASIO’s Legal Resident (1963) and Peter Butt’s Final Rendezvous (2020) John Hughes April 2020 Feature Articles Within the archive meaning exists in a state that is both residual and potential. The suggestion of past uses coexists with a plentitude of possibili...
Hitting Rock Bottom: Representing Capital in Late Neoliberal Cinema Jensen Suther April 2020 Feature Articles The winner of this year’s Best Picture award at the Oscars was a South Korean film about class resentment, economic desperation, and the parasitic dep...
The Last Film Festival: the 2020 Berlinale Daniel Fairfax April 2020 Festival Reports I must confess, loyal reader, that there can occasionally be something of a lag between the end of a film festival that I am covering and the moment w...
AFI/AFM 2010 – Places to Fly Away From Bérénice Reynaud April 2020 Festival Reports I believe in ghosts, vampires and public employees That a certain morning fly away from their houses. Because I am a man in love. — Luis Caicedo P...
Pandemic Diary of a Lonely Cinephile: CPH:DOX 2020 Pernille Lystlund Matzen April 2020 Festival Reports When reality starts to look increasingly like a dystopian sci-fi film, how does a film festival concerned with the documentary genre respond? For CPH:...
Collective Heroes: Activism and Activation at the International Film Festival Rotterdam Tara Judah April 2020 Festival Reports As I write, supermarket shelves sit empty. People are stockpiling toilet paper, hand sanitiser and other household goods in preparation for a lockdown...
SXSW Lite: Mutating Social Hustle Into Couch Potato Charm Dirk de Bruyn April 2020 Festival Reports Five days before I got on a plane to SXSW, the world turned. All international travel was cancelled by my institution. A hammer blow. It took time to ...
A Festival is a Space in Time: the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival Leonardo Goi April 2020 Festival Reports As I type these words, a few months after leaving the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF), I don’t exactly know when the next fest wi...
Digging for Gold: To Save and Project: The 17th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation Tanner Tafelski April 2020 Festival Reports In a city bursting with monthly repertory programming, the Museum of Modern Art’s To Save and Project series stands out as an annual must-attend event...
In Praise of Collective Viewing: True/False 2020 Jordan M. Smith April 2020 Festival Reports It’s impossible to think about the 2020 True/False Film Festival outside of the context of the COVID-19 pandemic which really only began to reveal its...
A Resilient Ann Arbor Digs Deep Dirk de Bruyn April 2020 Festival Reports Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest running avant-garde and experimental film festival in North America. 1963 was its foundation year. This year wo...
Sundance 2020 Bérénice Reynaud April 2020 Festival Reports What are you looking at when you’re looking at me? As Sundance may be one of the last film festivals I will cover for a while, maybe it is a good tim...
Wise, Robert Adrian Schober April 2020 Great Directors Robert Earl Wise b. 10 September, 1914, Winchester, Indiana, USA d. 14 September, 2005, Westwood, Los Angeles, USA Wise is varied. He seems able...
Fernández, Emilio “Indio” Abel Muñoz Hénonin April 2020 Great Directors b. 26 March 1906, Mineral del Hondo, Coahuila, Mexico d. 6 August 1986, Mexico City Emilio “Indio” Fernández set himself as a goal, perhaps one of...
The Big Goodbye: “Chinatown” and the Last Years of Hollywood, by Sam Wasson Fabrice Ziolkowski April 2020 Book Reviews I’ve had a quasi-symbiotic relationship to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown ever since I first laid eyes on it in May 1974. It was at a preview screening of...
Reading Film: Light into Ink: A Critical Survey of 50 Film Novelizations, by S. M. Guariento Deborah Allison April 2020 Book Reviews Film novelisations have been circulating in substantial numbers for well over a century. To say they have been underrepresented in critical studies of...
A meet and happy conversation: Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema by Catherine Wheatley Dominic Lash April 2020 Book Reviews The philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926-2018) was the author of a relatively small but extremely rich collection of books and articles on film, mostly co...
The Past Is Not Even Past: Afterimages, by Laura Mulvey Tony McKibbin April 2020 Book Reviews It could almost be a parlour game to try to talk about Laura Mulvey without mentioning her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, with i...
Hard Labour: Cecil Holmes’s Captain Thunderbolt (1953) Adrian Danks April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film This is an extended and amended version of an article that first appeared in Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand, edited by Ben Gol...
Adrift in the Shadows of Fog: Forget Love for Now (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1937) Rolland Man April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In his book In Praise of Shadows Junichiro Tanizaki identified in 1933 the attraction to shadows as one principle of Japanese aesthetics: “We delight ...
Kiss Me, Stupid (Billy Wilder, 1964) Martyn Bamber April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Skewering celebrity vanity, the allure of success and the obsession with fame, Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) takes a long, hard look at these subjects and is...
A journey through 1930s Japan: Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936) Nicholas Bugeja April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film The bus driver (Ken Uehara) at the heart of Mr Thank You derives his eponymous sobriquet from what he says to those roving through rural Japan when th...
Starstruck (Gillian Armstrong, 1982) Ben Kooyman April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Pauline Kael, the great American film critic, was decidedly lukewarm on Australian cinema. In an interview with Cinema Papers, she elaborated that “Mo...
The Masquerade is Over: Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) Adrian Danks April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) was one of the projects closest to Billy Wilder’s heart – an organ that some commentators question even exi...
The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963) Martyn Bamber April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film The subject of The Servant (1963) is the English class system and its tensions in swinging sixties London. The battleground for this class struggle is...
G’day Comrade: Cecil Holmes’s Three in One (1956) Adrian Danks April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film This is an extended and amended version of an article that first appeared in Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand, edited by Ben Gol...
That which is planted: A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Douglas Sirk, 1958) Grant Bromley April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to ...
Creating light, sharing concern: Little Women (Gillian Armstrong, 1994) Kristi McKim April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Necessity is indeed the mother of invention. Somehow, in that dark time, our family, the March family, seemed to create its own light. – Jo March (Wi...
A cinema of resistance: My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979) Gabrielle O'Brien April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Loneliness is a terrible price to pay for independence. Sybylla, don’t throw away reality for some impossible dream. - Aunt Gussie (Patricia Kennedy)...
Bad love: The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974) Jeremy Carr April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film There has scarcely been a more unsettling and perversely potent love story than that which stimulates the precarious heart of Liliana Cavani’s Il port...
Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder, 1953) Brad Weismann April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Stalag 17 is not the original prisoner-of-war film, nor the first escape film. Its most notable predecessors include such films as Mervyn LeRoy’s I am...
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) MaoHui Deng April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film The narrative of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Loong Boonmee raleuk chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010) follows the last days of it...
Pass it on: Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2000) Kenta McGrath April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Mysterious Object at Noon. Even at a first glance, Thai artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first feature has one of the most evocative t...
The kids are not alright: Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) Claire White April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film “Children are always pretending,” Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) consoles her friend Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) after the latter’s daughter, Sarah Jan...
Romance, escapism and war in Ornamental Hairpin (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1941) Nicholas Bugeja April 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In Hiroshi Shimizu’s 1941 film, the titular object of the ornamental hairpin firmly holds the story in place; the lynchpin of it, so to speak. On a fa...
Rubble romance: A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948) Jeremy Carr March 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film A United States congressional envoy flies over bombed-out Berlin, its members on their way to the East German city to evaluate the morale of occupying...
Announcement: Senses of Cinema-Monash Essay Prize winner the editors May 2020 News We are thrilled to announce the Senses of Cinema-Monash Essay Prize awarded to the best published work in 2019 by an Australian contributor. This prize has been established in partnership with Monash Univer...
Learning to Breathe: A Conversation with Joanna Hogg Leonardo Goi April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe “She hasn’t had anything since breakfast,” a publicist warns me, nodding at the lady nibbling on a salad and chatting with a journalist a few tables a...
Reaching Into History: Radu Jude on Uppercase Print and The Exit of the Trains Hugo Emmerzael April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe When Radu Jude emerged on the film festival circuit in 2009 with his feature debut, Cea mal ferictã fatã din lume (The Happiest Girl in the World), he...
“Home, far away from Home”: Truong Minh Quý on The Tree House Andrew Northrop April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe In Vietnam, the Jarai people engage in a spiritual practice around tomb houses – small huts containing mementos from deceased community members. They ...
“Resistance is part of the process”: A Conversation with Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese Wilfred Okiche April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese wants a smoke. We meet at Park City’s Main Street, the extremely busy heart of the Sundance film festival where Mosese is ...
The Year of the (Re-)Discovery: A Conversation with Luis López Carrasco Leonardo Goi April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe “I think cinema has helped me turn sadness into anger. But this is not an angry picture.” From the third floor of de Doelen, Luis López Carrasco stare...
A Simple Life: Arun Karthick on Nasir Leonardo Goi April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe At the young age of 27, Tamil cineaste Arun Karthick has already taken Rotterdam twice. In 2016, his debut feature The Strange Case of Shiva found a s...
Women’s Cinematic Heights in Times of Covid: An Interview with Eliza Hittman Brigitta Wagner April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe A million years ago, or what feels about that long, Berlin got away with one of the last major film festivals before Covid-19 halted not just life as ...
Slowly Diving from Reality Into Fantasy: A Conversation with João Pedro Rodrigues Tomáš Hudák April 2020 Conversations with Filmmakers Across the Globe João Pedro Rodrigues’ films are portraits of misfits. In O Fantasma (Phantom, 2000), it’s a young garbage collector who lives in a tiny flat and canno...
