Welcome to Issue 99! the editors July 2021 Editorial As we write the Cannes film festival has just ended and triumphantly claimed itself a “return to cinema!”. 2021, which is turning out to be a lot more like 2020 than we were expecting, is certainly banging out ...
Australian Autofiction: A Filmmaker Roundtable by Chris Luscri Chris Luscri July 2021 Australian Autofiction Outside of small research studies and articles that have appeared in academic journals, there is an absence of in-depth contextual work around persona...
Corinne Cantrill’s In this Life’s Body – A Personal Experience Margot Nash July 2021 Australian Autofiction I first saw Corinne Cantrill’s feature-length essay documentary In This Life’s Body in the old Valhalla Cinema in the Sydney suburb of Glebe. It must ...
Breathing Under Water: a film by Susan Murphy Dermody Felicity Collins July 2021 Australian Autofiction A chook enters the frame. A black cat evades the lens. An animated panther won’t be denied. In 2021, these are the figures that lurk on the outskirts ...
The Dissolution of Self Dirk de Bruyn July 2021 Australian Autofiction Saidin Salkic is a Bosnian-Australian filmmaker whose recent prolific output includes Waiting for Sevdah (2017, 40 mins), Silence’s Crescendo (2018, 4...
Action and Reflection: Autobiography, Film History and the Australian Independent Documentary Adrian Danks July 2021 Australian Autofiction “The time for action is over… The time for reflection begins.” In Margot Nash’s deeply personal essay film The Silences (2015), she mines her own pas...
Singing songs of sevdalinka in Saidin Salkic’s The Shells Exploding Gently Chris Luscri July 2021 Australian Autofiction Saidin Salkic’s new film The Shells Exploding Gently (2020) begins, characteristically, as a work in extremis. A face, a voice, the camera held close,...
Structures of Obsession: A Partial Appreciation of Philip Tyndall’s Words and Silk Jack Rowland July 2021 Australian Autofiction “Every two or three years I watch a film, but I’m always sorry afterwards that I’ve watched it. The images in films never seem real to me.” Gerald Mu...
Fear of the Dark Dirk de Bruyn July 2021 Australian Autofiction Peter Tammer’s Fear of the Dark (1985) is partly a fictional exploration and re-enactment of the process of murder and violent intent. It is also part...
My Life Without Steve Philippa Hawker July 2021 Australian Autofiction Gillian Leahy’s 1986 film, My Life Without Steve, is a story of solitude, pain and obsession, of raw emotions elegantly presented and endlessly interr...
Some notes on My Blessings Fiona Villella July 2021 Australian Autofiction As this dossier shows, there is a rich and long history of personal filmmaking in Australian independent cinema. The films that belong to this traditi...
On Filming the Unimaginable: Memory, Silence and Time in Allison Chhorn’s The Plastic House Julia Flaster July 2021 Australian Autofiction How do you represent the ‘unrepresentable’, or even the ‘unimaginable’? This question has been at the heart of a wave of post-Khmer Rouge cinema by se...
Occupied Territory and Abolitionist Freeze Frames: Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama David Grundy July 2021 Feature Articles A matter of miles from Hollywood but a world away lies Watts, Los Angeles. As Thom Andersen observes in Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003): “The 1965 Wat...
The Black And White Epic No Budget Digital Feature Film Rob Nilsson July 2021 Feature Articles When I think about contemporary American cinema there are things to be thankful for and, as with cell phone addiction and social media mania, a good d...
A Cocktail of Lunacy and Love: Poetic Dimensions in Fabrice Du Welz’s “Ardennes” Trilogy Peter Verstraten July 2021 Feature Articles After a modest attempt to create a national film industry in bilingual Belgium had run aground in the 1950s, Belgian cinema was split into two separat...
Collectif Jeune Cinéma at 50: A Subjective Conversation Raphaël Bassan, Théo Deliyannis and Viviane Vagh July 2021 Feature Articles In the midst of the present devastating economic and social planetary pandemic, the Collectif Jeune Cinéma (CJC) is celebrating its 50th anniversary o...
Favouritism In The Field of Vision: Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite Cam Scott July 2021 Feature Articles Few are so beholden to normalcy as the provocateur. Whether satirically or advantageously, the transgressor fanatically attests to the strength of a m...
Too Soon, Too Late: The Temporality of Ecological Grief in Cinema Kasia Van Schaik July 2021 Feature Articles “Do you burst into tears at the mere mention of the shrinking Amazon rainforests?” the article I’m scrolling through over breakfast wants to know. “Do...
Relative Truth: The Truth and Invented Memories Linda Ehrlich July 2021 Feature Articles Molly Haskell describes La Vérité (The Truth, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2019) as “an anxious and lyrical family drama,” noting how it presents “the way in wh...
A Boundless Experience: Mark La Rosa’s Boundless David King July 2021 Feature Articles There is the kind of cinema which reassures people that the world is as they prefer to think it is. That there is some kind of meaning and sense to li...
Sunken Film: Bill Morrison Talks The Village Detective: a song cycle Andrew Northrop July 2021 Interviews The cover of the October 2019 issue of FIAF’s Journal of Film Preservation sees Erlendur Sveinsson of the National Film Archive of Iceland standing ov...
An Interview with the late Monte Hellman (1929-2021) Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2021 Interviews One of the legendary figures of the American cinema, the late Monte Hellman (1929 – 2021) is best known for directing Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), consid...
“I Myself am a Woman”: A Conversation with Han Shuai Maja Korbecka July 2021 Interviews Writer-director Han Shuai’s Summer Blur, the winner of the Grand Prix for Best Film in the Kplus competition at the 2021 Berlinale, is a mesmerising t...
Brave New World: the 2021 Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax August 2021 Festival Reports How does it feel to return to the cinema? I asked myself this question as my plane taxied on the runway at Nice airport one fine July morning, the shi...
The Realm of the Sensible and the Short Film: The 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Shekhar Deshpande July 2021 Festival Reports The 67th edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen went online for the second successive year, this time with wider ambitions. It ex...
To Be Crossed and Shattered: Solidarity as Disruption at the 67th International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Steffanie Ling July 2021 Festival Reports In last year’s festival report of Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen I lamented a number of programs that were postponed, including the theme prog...
Familiar and Not-Familiar: An Uncanny Journey Through the 22nd Jeonju International Film Festival Marc Raymond July 2021 Festival Reports Last year, for the first time since 2007, I was unable to attend the Jeonju film festival, as it was in effect canceled, although there was still a pr...
Lucas, George Dan Golding July 2021 Great Directors b. 14 May, 1944, Modesto, California, USA The place to start with George Lucas, director, is at the beginning. Aged 23, the then-USC film student w...
Riefenstahl, Leni Jeremy Carr July 2021 Great Directors b. 22 August, 1902, Berlin, Germany d. 8 September, 2003, Bavaria, Germany Does Leni Riefenstahl even belong here, ranked alongside the world’s mo...
Rhythm and Light: Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz, by Laleen Jayamanne Steven Shaviro July 2021 Book Reviews Laleen Jayamanne’s beautiful new book, Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gify, enlivens the spirits of its readers every bit as much as the movies i...
West Side Story Redux: West Side Story: The Jets, the Sharks, and the Making of a Classic, by Richard Barrios Adrian Schober July 2021 Book Reviews Later this year will mark the 60th anniversary of the release of West Side Story (Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins, 1961), the landmark American music...
Foraging in a Transforming Mediascape: Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India, by Lalitha Gopalan Megan Carrigy July 2021 Book Reviews In Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India Lalitha Gopalan brings to life the complexities of contemporary independent feature production in India. She...
The Strange Beast: Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) Donovan Renn June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film If you're looking for explanations or answers to the mysteries of this beguiling film, the original Thai title might be a clue: Sud pralud. You can he...
Anthems and Illusions: On a Few Shorts By Apichatpong Weerasethakul Brian Darr June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Imagine that every time you went to the movies you had a chance to see your favorite short film, right after the upcoming attractions trailers and bef...
His Particle, Somewhere: Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012) Duncan Caillard June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film Apichatpong’s father died in 2003, and his ashes were spread in the Mekong. During an interview for this year’s Berlinale, for which the director call...
Worldly Desires (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2005) Darragh O’Donoghue June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film A jungle in Thailand at night, filmed in one long shot. There are the murmurs of nature. Lights flash onto a clearing - the spotlights of a film crew....
Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2002) Thomas Moran June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film What does it mean to sign off a letter with the phrase blissfully yours? What would it mean to translate an afternoon of bliss into a two-hour film? ...
Not so unknown after all: Jean Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un inconnu (Autobiography of an Unknown) (Edgardo Cozarinsky, 1983) Jytte Holmqvist June 2021 CTEQ Annotations on Film A film is not the telling of a dream, but a dream in which we all participate together through a kind of hypnosis, and the slightest breakdown in the ...
