Author Daniel Fairfax

One of the Young Turks of semiotic film theory in the 1970s, counting Umberto Eco and Christian Metz among his mentors, Francesco Casetti established himself as a major figure in the field of film studies in It...

A professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, Dana Polan has written prolifically on film and television since receiving a PhD from Stanford in 1980 and a Doctorat d’État from the Univ...

With a background in academic research, criticism and film curation, the Swiss-born scholar Vinzenz Hediger is presently Professor of Film Studies at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main. His doctoral wo...

Angela Ndalianis is Research Professor in Media and Screen Studies at Swinburne University in Melbourne, and a member of the Senses of Cinema committee. Her research focuses on entertainment culture and the his...

Weihong Bao completed her PhD at the University of Chicago in 2006, and is now an Associate Professor in Chinese and Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include Chines...

End of Story, End of Cinema: Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend was released in Paris on December 29, 1967, capping a calendar year in which he premiered no less than three features and ...

There are two ways of judging the merits of films: those that are worthy, and those that are great (I will momentarily leave to one side what a philosopher who knew two or three things about the cinema once cal...

Abbas Kiarostami’s death this July, at the age of 76, was a moment of profound sorrow for the world’s film community. The affecting images of his public funeral – with the streets of Tehran teeming with mourner...

“Critic and actor!” trumpeted the press-kit for François Truffaut’s 1972 comedy Une belle fille comme moi (A Gorgeous Girl Like Me). Few have successfully managed to combine the two professions. Michel Delahaye...

A touchstone for the highly politicised debates in film criticism during the 1960s and 1970s, the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet appeared, by the early 2000s, to have suffered a terminal decline...

This article seeks to interrogate the role of the image in confronting changes to the ways they function within what we may term ‘new media’, and the effects these have had on the traditional “apparatus” of the...

It’s one of the oldest clichés in football. A team dominates the match and is ahead on the scoreboard at half-time, but throws their lead away after play resumes. Or the reverse: after meekly surrendering in th...

The corpus of Jacques Rivette’s critical writings for Cahiers du cinéma is as influential as it is modest in size. Roughly 50 articles appeared under Rivette’s name alone, although this total is bolstered by hi...

It’s one of the great gags in film theory. Writing in 1969, Cahiers du cinéma editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni devise a seven-part critical typology of the cinema, based on the political or ideologic...

A Cinematic Hapax Legomenon: One More Time (1970) In linguistics the term hapax legomenon (Greek for “something said once”) is used to denote a word that only makes a solitary appearance in the written record ...

Roland Barthes was notorious for his self-proclaimed “resistance” to the cinema. In fact, he hated the medium so much he could only bring himself to go the movies once a week. A paradox, of course. But it is an...

As I walked through the old park, icebound and solitary, I evoked the past with my fellow spectre. With eyes deadened, and lips softened, our voices could barely be heard. Was the Cannes film festival really th...

As I sat watching P.T. Anderson’s The Master in an East Village cinema during its theatrical release, a curious thought came over me. In the middle of the screening, with the 70mm print unspooling before my eye...

A disclosure is in order. The author of The Lumière Galaxy – Italian-born, Connecticut-based film studies professor Francesco Casetti – teaches in my department, and has been a key mentor figure over the years,...

On January 25, 2015, a new day dawned on Europe. For the last half-decade, the old continent has been immersed in a miasma of despair, as it has struggled with the effects of an economic crash that, under the o...

Jean-Pierre Léaud strides down the middle of a narrow Parisian street, declaiming a few lines of nonsense poetry, which he repeats several times over in circular fashion, such that one soon loses track of any s...

On the concluding page of his study of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), Michael Witt tells us of the publication of a collection of cinema-related tales titled Quelques histoires de cinéma i...

After winning a Tiger Award at the 2011 Rotterdam film festival, Sergio Caballero’s sui generis feature debut Finisterrae, with its tale of two ghosts making a pilgrimage across Spain, hit the festival circuit ...

The first time one attends the Cannes film festival, the overwhelming sensation is one of shock – shock at a world so displaced from one’s everyday existence, with its idiosyncratic codes, Byzantine regulations...

Thursday, October 3  20:30 (AEST), Melbourne Airport My flight leaves in less than an hour. Boarding has begun, but my zone has not yet been called. A teary good bye to Sylvie and a heated phone call to Emira...

If there was a dominant theme to come out of the critical coverage of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IIFR), it was one of cinematic glut. Report-backs on the festival from two of the most in...

Albert Serra It was with some trepidation that I watched Catalonian director Albert Serra’s Historia de la meva mort (The Story of My Death) at this year’s Viennale. After quickly gaining notoriety as an en...

On arrival in Pordenone, the city is very much as I expect it: a nondescript small town in northern Italy, centred on its vibrant piazza, with an architectural mixture of 19th century apartment blocks, Fascist-...

There are festivals that are objectively deemed to be ‘major’, and then there are festivals that have a special place in our individual hearts. The Viennale certainly occupies this latter position for me, but I...

In a rare idle moment at Cannes, amidst the hectic schedule of screenings, I found myself nursing a glass of mineral water on the terrace of the Caffé Roma, a sprawling establishment abutting the Croisette, mer...

Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination by Tara Forrest (ed.) Is there anybody on the face of the Earth, in any field of the arts or sciences, who is more prolific than Alexander Kluge? His reputati...

It was in the sad month of February, When the days had become dreary, And when the wind whipped at the trees, That I made my way to Germany.  And when I to the border came, I felt a mighty hammering In my...

Editor of Cahiers du cinéma between 1965 and 1973, Jean-Louis Comolli’s foundational place in the history of film theory will be assured by several key texts – among them “Technique and Ideology”, “Cinema/Ideol...

Shortly into the second part of Chris Marker’s epic 1977 compilation film Le Fond de l’air est rouge, one of the great acts of montage in the history of the cinema takes place. After presenting us with a prolon...

On the first weekend of this year’s Cannes, the heavens opened with a ferocity and persistence rare for the Côte d’Azur, dousing the red carpet galas and sending hordes of festival attendees, unprepared for inc...

In depth interview with one of the seminal figures in the emergence of a Marxist/Althusserian oriented film theory. In this first of a two-part interview, to be published over two issues, Comolli discusses the “Cahiers years” between 1965 and 1973.