Welcome to Issue 70 of our journal the editors March 2014 Editorial Issue 70 Readers may find it odd at first to see Federico Fellini’s name appear as an author on the content’s page of our current issue – perhaps for no other reason than the fact the Italian director passed away...
Creator of Sounds as Shapes: Andrew Keith Plain (1953 – 2013) Helen Macallan March 2014 Feature Articles Issue 70 Andrew Plain who died at the age of 60 in Sydney in December, gained his national and international reputation as one of Australia’s most...
In Memoriam: Miklós Jancsó (1921-2014) Christopher Mildren March 2014 Feature Articles Issue 70 The great Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó has died at the age of 92, leaving behind one of the more indisputably unique bodies of work in cinema...
Making a Film Federico Fellini March 2014 Feature Articles Issue 70 Translator’s Preface Federico Fellini Federico Fellini’s Fare un film (1980) is the most comprehensive collection of the idiosyncratic...
The “Squaw Man” Western Susan E. Linville March 2014 Feature Articles Issue 70 “All my life I’ve been mostly alone. I wanted it that way. But then when I saw you in the wikiup, and you touched me, and you prayed for me, I...
Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves and Modern Spain Jorge Latorre March 2014 Feature Articles Issue 70 he history of Spanish art features many courageous people. I am always championing it because it is very difficult to see. he value of Italian art...
Middle-of-the-Road Absurdism: The Cinema of Dutch Director Alex van Warmerdam Peter Verstraten March 2014 Feature Articles Issue 70 Practically all published items on Borgman (2013), no matter how tiny, mentioned the fact that this was the first Dutch film to enter the Cannes main...
The Adaptation and the Remake: From John M. Stahl’s When Tomorrow Comes to Douglas Sirk’s Interlude Tom Ryan March 2014 Feature Articles Issue 70 Raising Cain: Setting the Record Straight Douglas Sirk shot Interlude in 1956, between Battle Hymn and The Tarnished Angels. Starring June Allyson...
Cultural and Political Exhaustion in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty Carlotta Fonzi Kliemann March 2014 Feature Articles Issue 70 Upon watching La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013) by Paolo Sorrentino, the first two surfacing feelings are: what a stunning piece of work,...
On Watching Movies in Planes: Diary of an International Flight Daniel Fairfax March 2014 Feature Articles Issue 70 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...
Uncanny, Haptic Encounters and the Importance of Play: An Interview with Josephine Decker, Filmmaker Brigitta Wagner March 2014 Feature Articles Issue 70 Not all actors are filmmakers, and not all filmmakers can act. And certainly not all actor-filmmakers walk in slow motion in Times Square with cans...
When We Talk About Feminism at a Film Festival, What Are We Talking About?: The 1st China Women’s Film Festival Lydia Wu March 2014 Festival Reports Issue 70 When we talk about feminism what are we talking about? Equal rights, physical difference, female sexuality, female subjectivity, subversion of...
“Life is Not a Walk Across a Field”: the 43rd International Film Festival Rotterdam Daniel Fairfax March 2014 Festival Reports Issue 70 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...
Uncomfortably at Home: German Films at the 64th Berlinale Jaimey Fisher March 2014 Festival Reports Issue 70 In the press conference for Stereo, one of the Berlin Film Festival’s German films, the cast was asked why their film had already sold out its...
The Gleaners and Varda: The 2013 AFI FEST & American Film Market Bérénice Reynaud March 2014 Festival Reports Issue 70 Agnès Varda in Californialand A blonde walks in the street, sporting fashionable sunglasses; the image is in black and white, yet has a very...
Structuralist Film and the Birth of Surveillance: The 2013 Alternativa Film/Video Festival Dirk de Bruyn March 2014 Festival Reports Issue 70 This second visit to Belgrade, Serbia’s Alternativa Film/Video festival opened up a response to the parallel film histories encountered at last...
The Cycle of Cinema: The 22nd Brisbane International Film Festival Sarah Ward March 2014 Festival Reports Issue 70 In Lav Diaz’s Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan (Norte, the End of History), a 250-minute musing upon the reality of transgression and the perception...
How Not to Drown at Sea: The 33rd Sundance Film Festival and the 22nd Pan African Film and Arts Festival Bérénice Reynaud March 2014 Festival Reports Issue 70 Looking over the Frontier It’s a pity that, at Sundance, we are so busy trying to discover the next hot feature that the wonderful offerings of...
Cold Song: The 37th Göteborg International Film Festival Andrei Kartashov March 2014 Festival Reports Issue 70 The times when the North was the place of dragons are long gone. Viking ships don’t sail off the Scandinavian frozen shores anymore. Nowadays...
Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness: On Watching Avant-Garde Shorts at the 43rd International Film Festival Rotterdam Darren Hughes March 2014 Festival Reports Issue 70 “Most of the filmmakers I cover don’t get paid to make their films, so why should I expect to get paid to write about them?” – Michael...
Finding the Centre: The 64th Berlinale Philip Cartelli March 2014 Festival Reports Issue 70 Hito Steyerl’s 1998 film The Empty Centre follows the transformation of downtown Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz from a no-man’s land, once split in...
Falling Down by Jude Davies Deborah Allison March 2014 Book Reviews Issue 70 Falling Down is one of the latest entries in the ‘Controversies’ series, edited by Stevie Simkin and Julian Petley, and continues its project of...
Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas by Olivia Khoo, Belinda Smaill, and Audrey Yue Rochelle Siemienowicz March 2014 Book Reviews Issue 70 For those of us with an interest in Australian film, the idea of Asian Australian cinema might evoke a short list of names and titles, all from the...
The Overlook: On Patrick Keiller’s The View from The Train Daniele Rugo March 2014 Book Reviews Issue 70 An island is always an uncomfortable entity, for there the struggle between earth and water is simply contained, never entirely over. In one of many...
Flowering Blood: The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano, by Sean Redmond Wendy Haslem March 2014 Book Reviews Issue 70 We are in Tokyo in search of the oldest noodle restaurant in Japan. Its 1999 and pre-gps. Guided by scant details offered in the travel guide, we...
Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film. Ed. Amresh Sinha and Terence McSweeney. Allan Cameron March 2014 Book Reviews Issue 70 In the introduction to Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film, Amresh Sinha and Terence McSweeney make a case for their anthology’s unique...
Nicole Kidman: Stardom, Performance and Persona Tessa Chudy March 2014 Book Reviews Issue 70 I started reading Pam Cook’s study of Nicole Kidman at the same time that I started listening to the new David Bowie album. The song, “The Stars...
The General Rahul Hamid March 2014 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 Of the three great American clowns of the silent era, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, Keaton has emerged, by and large, as the...
Shame Hamish Ford March 2014 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 In the late 1960s Ingmar Bergman was not a particularly fashionable figure, despite having made the astonishing and experimental Persona in 1966 (now...
The Phantom of Liberty Gwendolyn Audrey Foster March 2014 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 “Chance governs all things; necessity, which is far from having the same purity, comes only later. If I have a soft spot for any one of my movies,...
Mirror Sam Ishii-Gonzales March 2014 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) directed seven feature films over a 24-year period. Zerkalo (Mirror), released in 1975, comes at the midway point in his...
Steamboat Bill, Jr. James L. Neibaur March 2014 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 In Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Charles Reisner, 1928) Buster Keaton, for his final independently produced feature, enjoyed a level of complete creative...
The Castaways of Providence Street: On Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel Mairead Phillips December 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 My introduction into the strange world of Luis Buñuel began with El Ángel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel, 1962), and it was a case of love...
On Saraband Afshin Forghani December 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 Prelude “Saraband” is a mournful, heart-wrenching piece of music. It came about during the very short period of time that Bach was free from any...
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Melissa Acker December 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 Six figures stride restlessly down a barren highway. He falls behind, she adjusts a buckle on her shoe and slowly they outpace one another – hardly...
That Obscure Object of Desire Pasquale Iannone December 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 While there are many examples of individual actors playing multiple roles in the same film – Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert...
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom Christopher Sharrett September 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 It appears to me that there is still a tendency among reviewers and film scholars to regard Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final masterpiece, Salò o le 120...
The Impotence of Asceticism: Luis Buñuel’s Simón del Desierto David Heslin September 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 “More welcome is slander to the pious soul than odious eulogies.” (1) Is the ascetic a paragon of humanity, or a self-indulgent masochist? This...
Stalker Brad Weismann September 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 I could go on and on about Tarkovsky. Thousands have. Some directors seem made for critical fodder. Hitchcock, Welles, Ford, Kurosawa, and...
Private Confessions Sarah Nichols September 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 In preparation for writing about Liv Ullmann’s Enskilda Samtal (Private Confessions, 1996), I took the opportunity to watch Ingmar Bergman’s...
Faithless Carlota Larrea September 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 Wendy Everett considers nostalgia and self-reflexivity as two distinctive features of European art cinema, and the exploration of subjectivity and...
The “High Sign” Andrew Grossman September 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline’s The “High Sign” (1921) is not only among Keaton’s most breathlessly inventive two-reelers – it is also,...
Mamma Roma and the Conflicted Passions of Pier Paolo Pasolini Bruce Hodsdon September 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 “I love life so fiercely, so desperately, that nothing good can come of it.” - Pier Paolo Pasolini (1960) (1) “Pasolini (in his death) has...
Hiroshima mon amour Joanna Di Mattia September 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.” - He (Eiji Okada) in Hiroshima mon amour (1959) The importance of bearing witness preoccupied Alain...
Who Let the Cats Out? Buñuel, Deneuve and Belle de jour David Melville September 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 Cinema is, above all, the art of the real. A series of images that show what actually was. When cinema overpowers reality and becomes a...
A Touch of Zen Tony Williams September 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 Celebrated as the first non-Mainland Chinese film to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival (in 1975), and released during the peak of contemporary...
L’Âge d’Or Darragh O’Donoghue September 2013 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 70 “Men of my generation, particularly if they’re Spanish, suffer from a hereditary timidity where sex and women are concerned. Our sexual desire...
Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009) Helen Goritsas March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 “Don’t run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins.” - Robert Bresson (1) Throughout human history from Euripides to J. K....
The Hunt: Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) Andrew McCallum March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 Producers’ Note: Photography of the hunting scenes in this film took place during an actual kangaroo hunt conducted by licensed professional...
One Night the Moon (Rachel Perkins, 2001) Georgina Wills March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 In Rachel Perkins’ musical One Night the Moon the convention of the duet typical of the classical Hollywood musical is reconfigured. In the film,...
Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009) Tess Fisher March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 Silence. Punctuated by the insistent ringing of a public phone. Ringing. Ringing. Ringing. Unanswered. This leitmotif in Warwick Thornton’s...
The Girlfriends (Peter Elliot, 1967) Geoff Gardner March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 Way back in 2003, Nigel Buesst did a solitary excavation of Melbourne filmmaking during the 1950s and ’60s. Those years were characterised by what...
Return Home (Ray Argall, 1990) Adrian Danks March 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 The history of Australian cinema is littered with small-scale, unobtrusive and even intimate portraits of working and middle class life that are...
“She Invited Herself”: Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975) Wes Felton February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 “Friday night too tired; Saturday night too drunk; Sunday, too far away.” – “The Shearer’s Wife’s Lament” Sunday Too Far Away is a...
Living for the Moment: Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (Mark Hartley, 2008) Martyn Bamber February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 “If you like outrageous cinema, you live and breathe to wait for those weird moments that happen every once in a while in genre cinema, where...
Moving Out (Michael Pattinson, 1983) Peter Hourigan February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 In a rundown school, a science-teacher, Mr Clarke (Ivar Kants), is at least able to keep trouble at bay in his class of bored, disengaged teenaged...
Aural Association and Sensory Affect in Snowtown (Justin Kurzel, 2011) Tara Judah February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 Almost as extraordinary as Justin Kurzel’s feature film debut, Snowtown, about the 1999 “Bodies in Barrels” murders, is the often-baulking...
A Star Revealed as Oceania’s Persistent Film Clichés Bite the Dust: A Look Back at the First Scene in Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992) Inge Fossen February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 Where does one begin a piece on Russell Crowe, Oceania’s most precocious and visible film export after Nicole Kidman? Which scene or what image...
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) Darragh O’Donoghue February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 The opening frames of Peter Weir’s film contrast the natural permanence of Hanging Rock with the man-made elevation of Appleyard College. This has...
Night of Fear (Terry Bourke, 1973) William “Bill” Blick February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 Critics have often described Terry Bourke’s Night of Fear as a “curio”. It was also a seminal work in an emerging horror genre. The film can be...
The Empty Space in Letters to Ali (Clara Law, 2004) Roger Dawkins February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 Clara Law’s Letters to Ali is a documentary about a family’s relationship with a 15-year-old Afghan refugee, “Ali”. Trish, her husband and...
Anger and Banality in Ghosts… of the Civil Dead (John Hillcoat, 1988) Thomas Caldwell February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 The anger that seethes throughout John Hillcoat’s debut feature film, Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, can be felt in almost every scene. Anger is...
The Death of Venus: Inside The Eye of the Storm (Fred Schepisi, 2011) David Melville February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 Adapted from a 1973 novel by the Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm is a tale of disintegration. Of a family, of a...
Looking for Captain Thunderbolt (Cecil Holmes, 1953) David Donaldson February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema Issue 70 The 1950s were not good years for feature filmmaking in Australia, still less so for Australians making films. There were two releases to exhibitors...
