Welcome to Issue 75 of Our Journal the editors June 2015 Editorial Feature image: Aurore (Viviane Vagh, 2008) Around this time last year I found myself in Paris. Travel, when possible, affords the opportunity to catch up with many of Senses of Cinema’s overseas-based contrib...
Janus of the Antipodes: An Interview with French-Australian Filmmakers Jayne Amara Ross and Viviane Vagh Raphaël Bassan June 2015 Feature Articles I had the idea to initiate a conversation with two filmmakers from different generations but with similar preoccupations. Two Franco-Australian filmma...
Experimental Cinema: An Interview with Raphaël Bassan Julia Gouin June 2015 Feature Articles Raphaël Bassan has worked as a freelance critic for many journals and magazines in France including Écran, Cinéma différent, La Revue du cinéma, and f...
Glimpses of Life: An interview with Albert Maysles Tom Ryan June 2015 Feature Articles Albert Maysles, who died on March 6 at the age of 88, was an American treasure, a documentary filmmaker for whom anything was a potential subject, sim...
Then and Now: Re-visiting Albert Maysles’ Early Celebrity Portrait Films Tim O’Farrell June 2015 Feature Articles The recent death of Albert Maysles set me reminiscing. I visited him at his spacious midtown Manhattan 54th Street offices in March 2005 while complet...
The Quest for Everyday Utopianism: An Interview with Corneliu Porumboiu Amir Ganjavie June 2015 Feature Articles Six years after receiving the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize for Police, Adjective (Politist, adjectiv), Corneliu Porumbiou returned to Cannes this year...
When Minimalism Meets the Martial Art Tradition: An Interview with Hou Hsiao-hsien Amir Ganjavie June 2015 Feature Articles After an eight-year absence, Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien has boldly returned to feature filmmaking with The Assassin (Nie Yinniang), a Tang dy...
Godard’s Defying Adieu Yvette Biro June 2015 Feature Articles Can one take for granted G’s intention or confession about his adieu? Adieu from what? From everything that personally used to matter so much to him, ...
An Interview with Denis Côté Wheeler Winston Dixon June 2015 Feature Articles Denis Côté is a young Canadian filmmaker who has burst onto the international film scene with a group of challenging and innovative movies in the past...
On Colonialism, Access and Form: A Discussion with Hubert Sauper Lydia Papadimitriou June 2015 Feature Articles France-based Austrian documentary filmmaker Hubert Sauper is not used to retrospectives of his work. But things may soon change, as the critical accla...
Nationalism: On and Off the Screen Moritz Pfeifer June 2015 Feature Articles Feature image: Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014.) For a while it seemed that Cold War cleavages were the last heydays of state approved art consum...
Notes on Bruno Dumont’s P’tit Quinquin, or Something is Rotten in the North of France Philip Cartelli June 2015 Feature Articles I. It’s the first one in the film – what is often dismissively labelled an establishing shot, as though all that it does is to set the stage for some...
Neighbourhood Realisms and the Return of Utopia: a Dive into the Effervescence of Contemporary Brazilian Cinema Victor Guimarães June 2015 Festival Reports Brazilian cinema is at a turning point, as much in terms of aesthetic experimentation as it is in terms of international recognition. In relation to t...
Dialogue of the Sentiments: the 68th Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax June 2015 Festival Reports 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 c...
Udine Believes in Tears: The 17th Far East Film Festival Chris Berry June 2015 Festival Reports The general mood at the Far East Film Festival (FEFF) in Udine this year was tearful – but in a good way. First, there were tears of joys at the festi...
Exploring the Liminal Space between Selection and Curation: 61. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Tara Judah June 2015 Festival Reports Oberhausen is an unusual festival. Content is selected and curated, as it is elsewhere, and yet, at Oberhausen, it doesn’t always feel as though the e...
SXSW 2015 Joseph Pomp May 2015 Festival Reports For the last few years, everyone has noted how large South by Southwest (SXSW) has gotten. The growth hasn’t necessarily slowed down (especially in te...
Godard after Farocki: Questions left open and questions unasked in Volker Pantenburg’s Film as Theory Toni Hildebrandt June 2015 Book Reviews “With Godard, and with Brecht, it seems to me as if they had only proclaimed a method, without having begun to work with it. In fact, even Godard issu...
Then and Now: On Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Nafis Shafizadeh June 2015 Book Reviews Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the brea...
Beyond the Fugue State: The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art by Dirk de Bruyn David Ritchie June 2015 Book Reviews In this original and dense cinema study, Dirk de Bruyn redefines the experimental and the avant-garde as “materialist film”, but in a much broader way...
Between Poetry and Film: A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film by Joseph Luzzi Luca Peretti June 2015 Book Reviews Joseph Luzzi’s A Cinema of Poetry: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film is a dense and layered book that focuses on different aspects of post-war Italia...
Size Matters: The Aesthetics of the Small Screen: André Bazin’s New Media by Dudley Andrew (ed.) Tony McKibbin June 2015 Book Reviews A glance at the title of André Bazin’s New Media might make us think that the writer has been resurrected, but the truth is that, since his death in...
The Life of the Cinephile Party: The Essential Raymond Durgnat by Henry K. Miller (ed.) Geoff Gardner June 2015 Book Reviews A long, long time ago English film magazines arrived in Melbourne after a journey by boat that often took several months. They could arrive in a rush,...
“…what I was seeking in my history of cinema was to be less alone”: Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television by Jean-Luc Godard (trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard) Michael Cramer June 2015 Book Reviews Caboose Books’ edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, translated and edited by Timothy Barnard, collect...
Kira Muratova’s The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) Evgeny Gusyatinskiy June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Released in 1989, Kira Muratova’s The Asthenic Syndrome immediately became a sensation and still remains one of the most groundbreaking films of the l...
Earth and Sunlight: Kira Muratova’s Getting to Know the Big Wide World (1978) Aaron Cutler June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film “What an immense joy this is. We’re building a huge factory. We’re building a huge city. Houses can be big, houses can be small, but it doesn’t really...
When A Woman Ascends the Stairs: Naruse’s Representation of Women in Post-War Japan Mel Aguilar June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film The international acclaim Mikio Naruse’s films received after the director’s death are an unique phenomenon in film history. Following the cinematic t...
Naruse’s Repast (Meshi, 1951) Darragh O’Donoghue June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film The problem with repasts is that, as nourishing and social as they can be, someone has to prepare them. And – even worse – to clear up after them. M...
Naruse’s World of Women: Flowing (1956) Adam Powell June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film One of leading directors of contemporary European cinema, Pedro Costa gave a lecture in Tokyo in 2005 where he outlined the potency of the great Japan...
Mother (Mikio Naruse, 1952) Luke Aspell June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film On its original release, Mother was a critical success; it came seventh in Kinema Jumpo's annual poll for 1952 (1), and was one of the few Mikio Narus...
“The ragged end of nowhere”: Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) Lauren Carroll Harris June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Notorious (1946) is widely known as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most lucid and pure works, emblematic of the auteur’s take on suspense and love, and his...
The Madman in the Attic: Gaslight and the ‘Psycho Dandy’ David Melville June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film She watched him, and was aware that his eyes were on the diamonds and not on her face. She quickly took them off and handed them to him. ‘I am afraid,...
Melodramatic Postwar Confessions: Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini’s La Paura (1954) Christopher Weedman June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film La Paura (Fear, 1954) is the final and arguably most underrated film collaboration between Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. Before their seven-y...
A Star’s New Stage: Elena and Her Men (Elena et les Hommes) Matthew Sorrento June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film It’s a moment of beauty disrupted by thundering, militaristic noise: Elena (Ingrid Bergman), a late-19th-century Polish princess, sits at a piano whil...
Three Doors into the Chamber of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata Julian Murphy June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film The edifice of Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre is of such vast scope and is riddled with such ramifying thematic veins that it is almost impossible to treat a...
An Interlude in Swedish Cinema: Gustaf Molander’s Intermezzo Shari Kizirian June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film When Hollywood came calling to sign both Ingrid Bergman and Gustaf Molander for a remake of Intermezzo (1936), the actress and the director’s reluctan...
Fly Me to the Moon: Love and Lunacy in The Outrageous Baron Munchausen Cerise Howard June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Of all the takes on the oft-filmed debonair teller of outlandish heroic tales introduced to the literary world in Rudolf Erich Raspe's Baron Munchause...
Dreams of Jules Verne: Karel Zeman’s Invention of Destruction (Vynález zkázy) Wheeler Winston Dixon June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film Like so many others in the United States, I was first exposed to Karel Zeman’s exotic adventure film Vynález zkázy (Invention of Destruction, 1958), w...
Any Way the Wind Blows: A Jester’s Tale Cerise Howard June 2015 CTEQ Annotations on Film After three feature length triumphs mixing live-action with animation, Karel Zeman took a departure from sci-fi and fantasy missions implausible and i...
We’re in Another Country – but David Gulpilil is Here to Help Dan Edwards July 2015 Special Dossier: Focus on David Gulpilil at MIFF 2015 Another Country is a film that takes time. As the narrator, co-writer and Australian screen star David Gulpilil notes at one point, “There’s never enough time in white fella culture.” Especially, he could have ...
What Happened To Billy?: David Gulpilil on Mad Dog Morgan Jake Wilson July 2015 Special Dossier: Focus on David Gulpilil at MIFF 2015 It’s December 2014, and I’m researching a book on the 1976 bushranger film Mad Dog Morgan – one of the best Australian films of the 1970s, a far-out antipodean Western directed by the much underrated pop surrea...
An Authentic Dreamtime: David Gulpilil and The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977) Lisa French July 2015 Special Dossier: Focus on David Gulpilil at MIFF 2015 This is a big, true story of my people… (David Gulpilil, Ten Canoes) Over more than thirty years, actor, dancer, musician and visual artist David Gulpilil has been deeply engaged in telling the “big, true” sto...
The Cinema of Michael Bay: Technology, Transformation, and Spectacle in the ‘Post-Cinematic’ Era Bruce Bennett - Leon Gurevitch - Bruce Isaacs June 2015 Michael Bay Dossier Special Dossier edited by Bruce Bennett, Leon Gurevitch and Bruce Isaacs Michael Bay occupies a curious place in contemporary culture. The films he h...
Rotational Aesthetics: Michael Bay and Contemporary Cinema’s Machine Movement Lisa Purse June 2015 Michael Bay Dossier It is no exaggeration to say that the Transformers franchise has occasioned the fiercest disparagements of Michael Bay’s audio-visual style. The films...
The Mechanics of Continuity in Michael Bay’s Transformers Franchise Bruce Isaacs June 2015 Michael Bay Dossier In perhaps the most scathing review in the mainstream media of Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) – the fourth release in the franch...
The Transforming Face of Industrial Spectacle: A Media Archaeology of Machinic Mobility Leon Gurevitch June 2015 Michael Bay Dossier Introduction In 2004 an advertisement featuring a car that transformed into a dancing robot appeared on US and European television. At thirty seconds...
The Cinema of Michael Bay: An Aesthetic of Excess Bruce Bennett June 2015 Michael Bay Dossier Fig 1: The spectacle of destruction in Bad Boys II Introduction Michael Bay’s films offer us some of the clearest examples of technically complex, ...
The Cinema Within: spectacle, labour and utopia in Michael Bay’s The Island Brian Baker June 2015 Michael Bay Dossier In this article, I will analyse Michael Bay’s The Island (2005) as a cinematic spectacle which, through its imaginating of a particular dystopian futu...
