Cinema in the Age of COVID the editors July 2020 Editorial As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on lives and societies around the world, the likes of which we have never seen (except in a disaster movie or dystopian fiction), we wanted to investigate further the impact...
Introduction: “How Do You Like It?” (Forty Years On) – The Shining in the Age of Global Quarantine Jeremi Szaniawski July 2020 The Shining at 40 “Forever and ever (and ever)” since its release, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) has generated an uncanny amount of literature, by critics and fa...
“Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are”: The Legacy of The Shining in Contemporary Cinema Jeremi Szaniawski July 2020 The Shining at 40 Much like Alfred Hitchcock with Psycho (1960), Stanley Kubrick sought, with The Shining (1980), to conduct an experiment in cinematic fear. While neit...
Reflections on The Shining Pip Chodorov July 2020 The Shining at 40 Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is a film about isolation and the threat of an invisible evil. It relates to our current situation insofar as now, in spr...
Jack’s Smart Home Marta Figlerowicz July 2020 The Shining at 40 In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson famously takes the Westin Bonaventure Hotel as an emblem of postmodern im...
King vs. Kubrick: The Origins of Evil Filippo Ulivieri July 2020 The Shining at 40 It is a common trope that authors rarely like films based on their novels. Stephen King, who at the time of this writing has seen 48 feature films and...
The Manly Veil Alexander Nemerov July 2020 The Shining at 40 The end of The Shining will always be enigmatic. In the movie’s final scene we see a photograph taken at the Overlook Hotel on July 4, 1921. It shows ...
Kubrick and the Paranoid Style: Antisemitism, Conspiracy Theories, and The Shining Nathan Abrams July 2020 The Shining at 40 If, as I have argued elsewhere, Stanley Kubrick is an intellectual, Jewish, and “Talmudic” filmmaker, his text most susceptible to Jewish or Talmudic ...
The Shining and Us – Participants to the Dossier Reflect on Their First Encounter with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Marta Figlerowicz, Alexander Nemerov, Joy McEntee, Christine Lee Gengaro, Geoffrey Cocks, Ian Christopher, Mick Broderick, Jessica Balanzategui, Nathan Abrams, Valerio Sbravatti, Ilaria Franciotti, Rick Warner, Jeremi Szaniawski, Pip Chodorov, Daniel Fairfax and Filippo Ulivieri July 2020 The Shining at 40
The Shining’s Uncanny Children and the Conflicted Nostalgia of Doctor Sleep Jessica Balanzategui July 2020 The Shining at 40 Through the character of Danny Torrance, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining influenced a new model of uncanny child character that has become a key trope o...
Overlooking the Stairs: Precarious Balance in Kubrick’s Mise-en-Scène Mick Broderick July 2020 The Shining at 40 A number of recurring motifs, themes and ‘signature’ styles have been attributed to Stanley Kubrick over the years, mostly from an auteurist perspecti...
The Shining’s Disjunctive Spaces Craig Buckley July 2020 The Shining at 40 Note Few buildings in the history of cinema are as essential to the plot of a film as the Overlook hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The film...
The Puzzles in the Scrapbook: An Inside Look at One of The Shining’s Most Enigmatic Props Ian Christopher July 2020 The Shining at 40 In The Shining no attention is drawn to it and it appears open, such that the page layouts are recognisable, only three times. This is perhaps why up ...
Cinema and Me: Family and History Through Film References in Kubrick’s The Shining Geoffrey Cocks July 2020 The Shining at 40 Much has been written about the intertextual richness of Stanley Kubrick’s cinema both in and of itself and in terms of its influence on other filmmak...
Forever and Ever and Ever: Reappraising the Score of The Shining Christine Lee Gengaro July 2020 The Shining at 40 Four decades is a short time in the grand scheme of all history, but in the realm of film music, it is a significant span. It is time enough to see ov...
Hijacking The Shining: Doctor Sleep Joy McEntee July 2020 The Shining at 40 The Shining is a resource that keeps on giving. It has generated a whole “universe” of creative, critical and fan activity. Stanley Kubrick adapted Th...
The Shining: An Afterlife in Memes Rod Munday July 2020 The Shining at 40 For a film about the afterlife, The Shining has had an unusual afterlife of its own. Forty years after its initial release, the imagery of Kubrick’s o...
A Stranger in the Hotel: Jean-Pierre Oudart and The Shining Daniel Fairfax July 2020 The Shining at 40 Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) has gained notoriety not only for the sheer quantity of critical analysis it has produced, a voluminous outpourin...
A Dramaturgical Analysis of The Shining Ilaria Franciotti and Valerio Sbravatti July 2020 The Shining at 40 The Shining is a glaring example of a film that has led to countless interpretations, favoured by its complex and enigmatic nature, sometimes leading ...
Feeling on Edge: Kubrick’s The Shining Between Horror and Comedy Rick Warner July 2020 The Shining at 40 Since its theatrical release in 1980, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has fit uneasily into the horror genre and has met with a discordant range of resp...
Video Essays Around The Shining: A Selection Miguel Marías July 2020 The Shining at 40 Featuring a brand new, original video essay by Miguel Mira and Olena Pikho, made especially for this dossier, this is the opportunity to look at a ser...
The Shock of the Old: The ‘Documentary’ Fiction Film Moment with COVID-19 Djoymi Baker July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID The current pandemic has not only prompted revived interest in viral dystopian films, but also inflects the way we engage with even the most mundane f...
Solitary Cinéastes: Filmmakers and Filmmaking in Isolation Martyn Bamber July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID “A repetition of identical days, the only variant of which is the cinephile menu”. – Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle (Just Don't Think I'll Scream,...
Cinephilia in Quarantine Katherine Connell July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID Like most people, the pandemic has meant I spend more time online. I’ve found Twitter to be a great resource: the feeds of many writers and cinephiles...
Corona Experimental Film Culture Gwendolyn Audrey Foster July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID While it’s impossible to say when film theatres will reopen, on the bright side, it has been both exciting and humbling to be involved in the rapid ev...
Two Bags of Doritos Michael Robinson July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID I have two bags of Doritos in my basement. On the first, Gal Gadot stands face front in a medium shot as Wonder Woman, her new golden winged armour...
Domestic Gestures: Revisiting Jeanne Dielman in Social Isolation Alexandra Trnka July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID Morning is a stray thread from which the rest of the day unravels. Before Covid-19 social isolation began, I prevented this reckless unravelling by le...
Film in the Age of COVID Fiona Villella July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID Occasionally throughout isolation, I’ve experienced that moment when two seemingly disparate films ‘talk’ to each other. Recently, I watched Midsommar...
The New Normal webmaster July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID Reading the surfeit of post-COVID commentary written over the past few months, a common refrain emerges: even when the coronavirus pandemic is brought...
Remains to be Streamed Kristy Matheson July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID Reading Tara Judah’s latest dispatch for Ubiquarian I was struck by this line: “what happens to the world when it is at our fingertips and eyeballs bu...
Reevaluating Hollywood History in Lockdown Robert Koehler July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID During this strange period of lockdown, I’ve divided my time between writing, reading, exercise, goofy time with my wife, following the daily news Hor...
Film in Lockdown Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2020 Cinema in the Age of COVID It’s been an interesting experience, to say the least. I’ve spent most of my time making movies, rather than watching them, as you can see here, and p...
Unearthing a Forgotten Television Work by Jean-Luc Godard Michael Witt July 2020 Feature Articles In 2016 I was conducting research for an article about a forgotten experimental montage film that Jean-Luc Godard had created and screened at the Rott...
Recollections of Coproducing Two Videos by Jean-Luc Godard for Prime-Time on Télévision Suisse Romande: Voyage à travers un film (Sauve qui peut (la vie)) (1981) and Scénario du film Passion (1982) Raymond Vouillamoz July 2020 Feature Articles Spécial Cinéma Spécial Cinéma was a weekly programme on Télévision Suisse Romande (TSR, public broadcaster in French-speaking Switzerland). First bro...
Soul-Surviving: Blinded by the Light Bill Mousoulis July 2020 Feature Articles Can a “feel-good” mainstream film ever be considered a great film? I think it can, but I don’t think Blinded by the Light (Gurinder Chadha, 2019) quit...
Hidden Images: The Disappearance and Re-appearance of the Leader Lady Wendy Haslem July 2020 Feature Articles This article has been peer-reviewed. I am in a darkened back room of The Australian Mediatheque watching one of the 128 films that were donated to ...
Pictures of You: Allison Chhorn’s The Plastic House Louise Sheedy July 2020 Feature Articles Early shots of Allison Chhorn’s The Plastic House (2019) tell a grim story. It’s dark. Headlights make a cemetery almost visible through a rained-on w...
Werner Hochbaum’s Forgotten Austrian Masterwork: Visual Experimentation, Proto-noir and the Hitchcock Connection in The Eternal Mask (1935) Robert von Dassanowsky July 2020 Feature Articles Since the clerico-authoritarian regime, often referred to as ‘Austrofascism’ (1933–38), which arose through Chancellor Dollfuss and his Fatherland Fro...
“To All Beautiful Losers”: Political Pessimism and the Hong Kong Sports Movie Brian Hu July 2020 Feature Articles This article has been peer-reviewed. In the sports drama Dim ng bou (Weeds on Fire, Chan Chi-fat, 2016), high school principal Lo Kwong-Fai propose...
Being There Without Being There in the Era of COVID-19: A Filmmaker’s Perspective Salvador Carrasco July 2020 Feature Articles Under the current restrictions of lockdown and quarantine, in which we are being asked not to leave our homes, “hands-on filmmaking” has become virtua...
An Ambiguous Gesture: Judith Anderson Turns the Table Murray Pomerance July 2020 Feature Articles Windows or Doors: Doors and Windows John Szarkowski’s 1978 show (and book) Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 explored the movement...
Ennio Morricone and the Stuff of Cinema Dan Golding July 2020 Feature Articles There are those who write music for the movies, and then there are those whose music reshapes the stuff of cinema. Ennio Morricone, who died in July t...
In Memoriam: Sarah Maldoror (July 19, 1929–April 13, 2020) Masha Shpolberg July 2020 Feature Articles Some filmmakers make their mark with a searing unity of vision. Film after film, they impose their inner landscapes or, perhaps, their unique way of s...
Your Daughters Come Back to You: The 28th Pan African Film and Arts Festival Bérénice Reynaud July 2020 Festival Reports The label of “auteur cinema”, whether poetic or political, is often the cloak under which African cinema is “discovered” and appreciated. We know the ...
Reimagining the Film Festival Landscape in the Time of a Global Pandemic: The 27th Sheffield Doc/Fest Sofie Cato Maas July 2020 Festival Reports Cinema is one of those rare forms of art where the relation and tension between aesthetics and ideology, past and present, and formalism and realism, ...
Closer Than Ever? The 1st Long Distance Film Festival Leonardo Goi July 2020 Festival Reports For all the festivals forced to cancel their yearly rendezvous in response to the COVID pandemic, there’s a tiny contingent that have blossomed under ...
More Like Collage Than Contest: The 67th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Online Steffanie Ling July 2020 Festival Reports The 66th Edition of the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen went online too, and we all know why. A moment to note and speculate on some persona...
Ghost Town Anthology: An Interview with Denis Côté Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2020 Interviews The prolific Canadian director Denis Côté has a new film out, entitled (in English; see below for more on this) Ghost Town Anthology (2019), which has...
The Unbearable Object of Liminality: A Conversation with Zheng Lu Xinyuan Łukasz Mańkowski July 2020 Interviews For the third time in a row, the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) went to a newcomer from China. This year, it was best...
“You Cannot Whitewash the Truth”- A Conversation with Arie and Chuko Esiri Wilfred Okiche July 2020 Interviews “Lagos na wa!” Anyone who has ever lived in Lagos has uttered this phrase at one point or other. Loosely translated from Pidgin English as “Lagos i...
Creating the Appearance of Being: The Art of American Screen Acting 1960 to Today, by Dan Callahan Tony McKibbin July 2020 Book Reviews There are very good books and articles on actors, about stardom, about performance, on acting and about acting. David Thomson and Pauline Kael have of...
The Restless Spectator: Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies, by Sarah Keller Joshua Heaps July 2020 Book Reviews In a recent blog post for Columbia University Press – “Anxious Afterthoughts on Anxious Cinephilia” – Sarah Keller provides her latest book with a cas...
Engaged Vision: Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave, by Steven Ungar Ivan Cerecina July 2020 Book Reviews Steven Ungar’s Critical Mass groups together and examines three-and-a-half decades worth of non-fiction filmmaking in France, making a compelling case...
Reagan at the Movies: Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, by J. Hoberman Nafis Shafizadeh July 2020 Book Reviews My concern is with a general movement of reaction and conservative reassurance in the contemporary Hollywood cinema. — Andrew Britton in Blissing O...
Hidden Faces, Hidden Identities: Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes without Faces, by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Shannon Scott July 2020 Book Reviews Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ Masks in Horror Cinema does not begin like a horror film, at least not in the sense of an attention-grabbing opening scene ...
Founding Father: A Tribute to Thomas Elsaesser (1943–2019) Daniel Fairfax July 2020 Obituary Thomas Elsaesser, a truly titanic figure in film studies, passed away unexpectedly at the age of 76 on December 4, 2019, while on a teaching assignmen...
“An Artist Always Paints His Own Portrait”: Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960) Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1959, just four years before his death from a heart attack, Jean Cocteau knew that his time was running out after years of ill health, opium addict...
Les Enfants Terribles (Jean-Pierre Meville, 1950) Martyn Bamber July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Writing about Les Enfants Terribles in mid-2020 during a global pandemic, it is tempting to draw parallels between the seclusion of real-world citizen...
The Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1932) Brad Weismann July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In August of 1963, two months before his death, Jean Cocteau recorded on film a “speech to the year 2000” in which he mused on his creative process. H...
Birds, Orphans and Fools (1969): the Rule of Three in Juraj Jakubisko’s Exemplary Gallows Bacchanalia Cerise Howard July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Jakubisko is kin to Brazil's Glauber Rocha, America's Robert Downey, Mexico's Alejandro Jodorovski, Yuri Ilyenko of the Ukraine, Sergei Paradzhanov of...
Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994) Darragh O’Donoghue July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film From its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, it was clear how deeply Through the Olive Trees was embedded in the past. It was the thi...
Lying About Homework (Abbas Kiarostami, 1989) Kenta McGrath July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film “It’s a film about homework.” Or so Abbas Kiarostami tells a group of schoolboys who approach him on the street and ask what he’s filming. “Have you ...
Realism, Morality and Care in Where Is the Friend’s House? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987) Sandra E. Lim July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film Kahne-ye doust kodjast? (Where is the Friend’s House?, 1987), is the first of three interrelated films in Abbas Kiarostami’s “Koker trilogy”, named af...
