Comedy and the Castratrice: Věra Chytilová’s Traps (1998) Alexandra Heller-Nicholas June 2018 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 87 Rape-revenge films directed by women are a rarity, and rape-revenge comedies even rarer; somehow, connecting the two, we find queen of the Czech avant-garde Věra Chytilová and her 1998 film Pasti, pasti,...
Dancing Daze and the Case of the Missing Campion Alexandra Heller-Nicholas June 2018 Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia Issue 87 The great misnomer that “everything is online” revealed to me once again how flawed an assumption it is about a year ago when I was thinking through my earliest memories of Australian women filmmakers. I...
Split/Screen Cattet/Forzani Alexandra Heller-Nicholas June 2018 Split/Screen Cattet/Forzani Issue 87 This dossier coincides with retrospectives of the work of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani at the Melbourne International Film Festival and the Queensland Film Festival in July and August, 2018. This dossier...
Facial Landscapes: Elina Löwensohn and Let the Corpses Tan (2017) Alexandra Heller-Nicholas June 2018 Split/Screen Cattet/Forzani Issue 87 Our planet has provided the most beautiful and ever changing natural landscapes in the form of mountains, oceans, forests and deserts. Human beings remain astonished by these variegated marvels of...
“Sudden Changes in the Weather”: Symptoms (José Ramón Larraz, 1974) Alexandra Heller-Nicholas March 2018 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 86 Catalan filmmaker José Ramón Larraz’s psychological horror film Symptoms – a UK production – was the British entry at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974. Despite this, the film was considered all but...
Abandoned Alice: Marilyn Manson’s Unmade Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll Alexandra Heller-Nicholas March 2018 Alice in Wonderland Issue 86 This is how the story goes: iconic shock-goth-glam-rock darling Marilyn Manson once tried to make a film about Lewis Carroll and Alice’s Wonderland tales, but so outraged were the public by the trailer alone...
Girls on Film: Growing Up with Cinema Papers Alexandra Heller-Nicholas July 2017 Pioneering Australian Women Issue 83 The first dedicated film magazine I ever bought was in March 1988, Issue #68 of the Australian publication Cinema Papers. Nick Cave was on the cover to promote the release of John Hillcoat’s Ghosts… of the...
Claudia Karvan: The Girl Most Likely Alexandra Heller-Nicholas July 2017 Pioneering Australian Women Issue 83 Across her 34-year career, actor Claudia Karvan has become one of the most familiar faces on Australian screens, winning numerous awards and becoming nothing less than a national film and television icon. With...
Adventure Time: On Guard (Susan Lambert, 1984) Alexandra Heller-Nicholas July 2017 Pioneering Australian Women Issue 83 The slightest spirit of ye olde timey explorer boils within when one ‘discovers’ a movie with little online imprint. Susan Lambert’s 1984 feminist terrorist heist film On Guard is such a curio, and...
Cinema as Sex on Cocaine: Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) Alexandra Heller-Nicholas June 2017 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 83 “No film has ever succeeded in making sex look at once so alluring and so glum. From its opening sequence, the film is a castration fantasy that conducts a running critique of the titillation it is...
Introduction: The Omnipresent Alice Alexandra Heller-Nicholas March 2017 Alice in Wonderland Issue 86 From the very outset, the Alice tales seemed destined for a life beyond the page. Indeed, the stories themselves speak with passion and eloquence about expanding our familiar imaginative frames of reference....
A Degree of Murder (Mord und Totschlag, Volker Schlöndorff, 1967) Alexandra Heller-Nicholas March 2017 Love Letters: 1967 Issue 82 Volker Schlöndorff’s 1979 adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum remains even by contemporary standards one of the most harrowing German films about World War II ever made. Unquestioningly,...
