Welcome to issue 74 of our journal the editors March 2015 Editorial Feature image: Inherent Vice artwork. Michelangelo Antonioni and Paul Thomas Anderson make for an odd coupling, but as it turns out, they make up the greater part of this issue. The Melbourne Cinémathèque’s...
Hard Clarity, Vaporous Ambiguity: The Fusion of Realism and Modernism in Antonioni’s early 1960s Films [1] Hamish Ford March 2015 Feature Articles Cinema today should be tied to the truth rather than to logic. And the truth of our daily lives is neither mechanical, conventional nor artificial, as...
Looking at / Looking in Antonioni’s Chung Kuo, Cina: A Critical Reflection Across Three Viewings Dan Edwards March 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Plate spinners at work in Shanghai, 1972, in Antonioni’s Chung kuo, Cina (1972). I want to be there, in that audience in 1972, watchin...
Michelangelo Antonioni: The Truth about The Passenger Theodore Price March 2015 Feature Articles Introductory note: 2015 sees the 40th anniversary of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (aka Profession: Reporter), arguably one of the Italian di...
The Crew: Antonioni’s Australian film that was not to be Antony Sellers March 2015 Feature Articles In 1975 Michelangelo Antonioni had completed his English language trio of films for Italian producer Carlo Ponti and MGM, an unique mainstream contrac...
A Zoomorphic Performance: Joaquin Phoenix in P.T. Anderson’s The Master Daniel Fairfax March 2015 Feature Articles 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...
California Dreaming: P.T. Anderson’s Take on Pynchon’s Inherent Vice Rolando Caputo March 2015 Feature Articles “We are interested in the plot of a play or film because it stages a problem whose solution we expect: we are expecting the plot to be resolved. So lo...
Los Angeles Plays Itself: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice Tim O’Farrell March 2015 Feature Articles With Paul Thomas Anderson’s auteur standing complementing Thomas Pynchon’s literary eminence and pop culture savvy, Inherent Vice (2014) promises to b...
The Trip as Mourning Comedy Adam Underwood March 2015 Feature Articles Don't you think everything's melancholic once you get to a certain age? - Rob Brydon (1) he only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it ...
Concrete Vanities: Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups Yaron Dahan March 2015 Feature Articles Vanity is so deeply rooted in man’s heart, that a soldier, a criminal, a cook, or a porter will boast and expect to have admirers, and even philosophe...
The Berlin Critic’s Week: A Discussion with Frédéric Jaeger and Dennis Vetter Yaron Dahan March 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 (dir. Johnnie To) “The Berlinale is not the problem, but only a symptom of German film culture,” announce...
The Art of Citational Cinema: An Interview with Alex Ross Perry Brigitta Wagner March 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Queen of Earth (dir. Alex Ross Perry, 2015) As a historian of German cinema, I used to cringe when people said, “German cinema? Oh, li...
The Bleakness of the Happy Ending: Sirk’s Uncomfortable Comedies Tom Ryan February 2015 Feature Articles Both in Europe and the US, Douglas Sirk’s best-known work was done in the realm of the melodrama, from Zu neuen Ufern (To Distant Shores,1937) to Imit...
Sundance/PAFF 2015: Vintage Years Bérénice Reynaud March 2015 Festival Reports Feature image: The Diary of a Teenage Girl (dir. Marielle Heller) A recent medical report intuits that people who complain live longer and healthier ...
Triumph of the Weird: the 2015 International Film Festival Rotterdam Daniel Fairfax March 2015 Festival Reports 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 strug...
AFI FEST-AFM 2014: Of the Good Use of Actors Bérénice Reynaud March 2015 Festival Reports The only US festival to have bothered with a FIAPF accreditation, AFI FEST presented by Audi joyously continues to assert its presence in the heart of...
Polanski, Roman Jeremy Carr March 2015 Great Directors b. Rajmund Roman Thierry Polański, August 18, 1933, Paris, France It is difficult to get a handle on Roman Polanski. His eclectic body of work ranges...
“Still an object to be discovered”: The Lumière Galaxy by Francesco Casetti Daniel Fairfax March 2015 Book Reviews A disclosure is in order. The author of The Lumière Galaxy – Italian-born, Connecticut-based film studies professor Francesco Casetti – teaches in my ...
Rerouting Early Cinema History: Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film by Jennifer Lynn Peterson Tanya Goldman March 2015 Book Reviews In the first decade of the twentieth century, moving images were a ubiquitous popular culture form, a fixture of fairgrounds, vaudeville houses, and e...
Mapping Artists’ Films: Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art by Erika Balsom Paolo Magagnoli March 2015 Book Reviews Feature image: Film (Tacita Dean) Variously designated as “gallery film”, “video art”, and “projected image”, the field of the moving image installat...
The Sinuous Line of World and Screen: On D.N. Rodowick’s Elegy for Theory and Philosophy’s Artful Conversations Reno Lauro March 2015 Book Reviews Feature image: Star Wars: The Phantom Menace In the final pages of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, published in 1985, Gilles Deleuze concludes by saying, “...
Penetrating Epstein: Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations by Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds.), and Une vie pour le cinéma: Jean Epstein by Joël Daire David A. Gerstner March 2015 Book Reviews The Jean Epstein renaissance currently underway has yielded two significant books from both sides of the Atlantic: French historian Joël ...
Stirring the Ripples: Wu Tianming’s The Old Well (Lao jing) Bérénice Reynaud May 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film When Wu Tianming died in March 2014, commentators around the world were aware that a page of Chinese film history had definitely been turned. Born in ...
Brittle Bonds in a Troubled World: Li Shaohong’s Blush (Hong Fen) Bérénice Reynaud May 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film China’s “Fifth Generation” was born out of a paradox – the enthusiasm of “rusticated youths” who had been sent by Mao to the countryside admitted to t...
Framing the Heavy Weight of History: Yellow Earth Dan Edwards May 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film It may be hard for contemporary audiences, even in China, to comprehend why Cheng Kaige’s Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984) made such a mark on the deve...
A Portrait of Lives Constrained: Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou Carlota Larrea May 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film The first three films directed by Zhang Yimou form a trilogy linked by their early twentieth century, pre-Communist settings, themes around social con...
Marginalised Visions: Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Horse Thief (Dao ma zei) John Berra May 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film A starkly hypnotic portrait of life in the Tibetan mountains, The Horse Thief (Dao ma zei) is the resplendent centrepiece in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s loose...
So Full Of Shapes Is Fancy: Matías Piñeiro’s Viola Chris Luscri April 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film The films of Matías Piñeiro represent something of an ouroboros for a writer enthused by the task of categorization and analysis, for the simple fact ...
One More Time: The Princess of France (La Princesa de Francia) Jaime Grijalba April 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Repetition has become a kind of staple by this point for Matías Piñeiro and his ensemble films, but in his latest, The Princess of France (La Princesa...
The Pace, Rhythm and Rules of the Game: They All Lie (Todos Mienten) Ioana-Lucia Demczuk April 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film A summer house in the country, a group of friends rehearsing a play, and an intricate web of lies and deception – this is the premise of Matías Piñeir...
Black Lives Matter: Do the Right Thing (1989) Jennie Lightweis-Goff April 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Three police officers restrain an unarmed African-American man in a chokehold, jerking his body so forcefully that his feet lift from the ground. Once...
Still Life, Slow Cinema: My Life without Steve John Hughes April 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film An essay film, staged as a short drama deploying a first person, diary film narration over exquisitely designed object oriented “still life” tableaus,...
Troubling the Boundary Between Original and Re-enactment: The Stolen Man (El Hombre Robado) Julian Murphy April 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film The canon shouldn’t be put behind glass in a museum. I’m interested in the idea of opening up canonical figures – we should be dealing with them as ou...
Jean-Pierre Melville’s Quand tu liras cette lettre: The Novice and the Homme Fatale Amidst Moral Decay in Postwar France Christopher Weedman April 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Esteemed as one of the most prominent French independent directors of the post-World War II era, Jean-Pierre Melville laid a proto-auteur framework fo...
The Sound of Silence: Jean Pierre Melville’s Le silence de la mer Adrian Danks April 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film This is a revised version of an article that first appeared in CTEQ: Annotations on Film published in Metro, no. 199, 1999, pp. 96-97. “For twenty-fi...
Cinematic Cool: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï Temenuga Trifonova March 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film This Annotation was originally published in Senses of Cinema Issue 39, May 2006. Le Samouraï/Frank Costello, faccia d'angelo/The Godson (1967 France...
Bob le flambeur Brian L. Frye March 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film This Annotation previously appeared in Senses of Cinema Issue 25, Mar–Apr 2003 and Issue 39, May 2006. Bob le flambeur (1955 France 100 mins) Sour...
Poison MaoHui Deng March 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film During the early 1990s, right after the AIDS crisis that plagued the 80s, a particular group of films burst into the consciousness of American cinema....
Scorpio Rising Jeremy Carr March 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film With its blistering rock and roll soundtrack, Kenneth Anger’s 1963 film Scorpio Rising – his twelfth short in 23 years – could be seen as a prelude to...
Lucifer Rising James Magrini March 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film “The true Magick of Horus requires the passionate union of opposites.” ~ Aleister Crowley In 1981 Kenneth Anger completed Lucifer Rising, his last ma...
Hard Eight and the Isolated Actor Paul Jeffery February 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film “When it's possible – in terms of the type of scene it is, where the camera is, how close the actors are to the lens and to the camera itself –Paul ge...
Boogie Nights Geoff Mayer February 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Boogie Nights (1997),Paul Thomas Anderson’s first fully formed film after the frustration and battles of his debut feature Hard Eight (1996), was conc...
There Will Be Blood John Fidler February 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Men die violently in There Will Be Blood (2007), Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature film. They are impaled by the tools of the oil trade in late 19t...
Magnolia: A Savage Attack on Masculinity and Whiteness Gwendolyn Audrey Foster February 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film It’s a shame that Hollywood audiences have been taught that films are made primarily to entertain and amuse. That’s only for the mass audience; other ...
Punch-Drunk Love Wheeler Winston Dixon February 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Adam Sandler has become such a reliable conveyor belt of cinematic schlock that people forget he once had aspirations beyond Dennis Dugan’s truly drea...
La notte Gwendolyn Audrey Foster February 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film One question I am often asked is why the women in my films are more lucid than the men. I was raised among women: my mother, my aunt, and lots of cous...
The Passenger Jonathan Dawson March 2012 CTEQ Annotations on Film “We know that under the image revealed there is another which is truer to reality and under this image still another and yet again still another under...
Le Amiche Hugo Santander Ferreira March 2011 CTEQ Annotations on Film There is a freshness to Le Amiche that will always surprise new generations of moviegoers. An early feature by Michelangelo Antonioni, it introduces u...
Fireworks Christopher Meir July 2003 CTEQ Annotations on Film Fireworks (1947 USA 14 mins) Source: ACMI/NLA Filmmaker: Kenneth Anger Completed at the tender age of 17, Fireworks – an audacious pre-Stonewall...
Il Grido: Modernising the Po James Brown May 2003 CTEQ Annotations on Film Il Grido (1957 Italy 106 mins) Source: ACMI/NLA Prod Co: Cei-Incom/SPA Cinematografica-Robert Alexander Productions Prod: Franco Cancelli...
The Love Letters from Teralba Road Harry Kirchner July 2001 CTEQ Annotations on Film The Love Letters from Teralba Road (1977 Australia 50mins) Source: NLA/CAC Prod: Richard Brennan Dir, Scr: Stephen Wallace Phot: Tom Cowan Assist: ...
Here Comes the Sun: New Ways of Seeing in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point Fiona Villella March 2000 CTEQ Annotations on Film Zabriskie Point (1970, US, 110 mins) Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni; Producer: Carlo Ponti; Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Fred Garner, Sam Shepard,...
