Ici et ailleurs: The Backstory Rula Shawan January 2022 Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard The 1960s saw turbulent political and social developments in the wake of World War II and the radical crisis generated by France's last colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria. The ramifications of these wars c...
Exploding the Sign from Within: Paradoxes of Post-Structuralist Epistemology in Adieu au Langage Patrick Kokoszynski January 2022 Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard “One never touches the thing itself but metaphorically.” – Jean-François Lyotard 1. In his emphatic review of Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language, Jean-Luc Godard, 2014) Blake Williams accurately describes...
Not the animal is blind, but the human being, blinded by consciousness and incapable of seeing the world. A Note on Roxy Miéville, Star of Jean-Luc Godard’s First Animal Picture, Adieu au Langage Vinzenz Hediger January 2022 Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard “With all of their eyes, animals behold openness.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, The Eight Duino Elegy (trans. Alfred Corn) “The meaning of the dog is the dog.” – Andrei Tarkovski In the general excitement over...
Relative Truth: The Truth and Invented Memories Linda Ehrlich July 2021 Feature Articles Molly Haskell describes La Vérité (The Truth, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2019) as “an anxious and lyrical family drama,” noting how it presents “the way in which families construct their mythologies, often at variance ...
Luis Buñuel’s El in the Face of Cultural Appropriation and the #MeToo Movement: A Filmmaker’s Reappraisal Salvador Carrasco May 2021 Feature Articles To my daughter Cassandra Before the first consumer-grade videotapes came out in the mid-1970s, it stands to reason that movies were not that readily available for the general public. If you were a well-estab...
Come and See The Painted Bird: A Filmmaker’s Plea Salvador Carrasco October 2020 Feature Articles Recently I saw what will most likely be my favourite film of the past year and foreseeable future, especially in light of the pandemic: The Painted Bird (Václav Marhoul, 2019), from the Czech Republic. I made a...
Abbas Kiarostami’s The Traveller (1974) Grant Bromley October 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1959, François Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) presented delinquent childhood in a manner that allowed for its lead actor, the 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, to become a star seemingl...
“An Artist Always Paints His Own Portrait”: Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus (1960) Wheeler Winston Dixon July 2020 CTEQ Annotations on Film In 1959, just four years before his death from a heart attack, Jean Cocteau knew that his time was running out after years of ill health, opium addiction, and a vagabond life that depended on the kindness of st...
Recollections of Coproducing Two Videos by Jean-Luc Godard for Prime-Time on Télévision Suisse Romande: Voyage à travers un film (Sauve qui peut (la vie)) (1981) and Scénario du film Passion (1982) Raymond Vouillamoz July 2020 Feature Articles Spécial Cinéma Spécial Cinéma was a weekly programme on Télévision Suisse Romande (TSR, public broadcaster in French-speaking Switzerland). First broadcast on September 25, 1974 it came to an end in the spring...
The Restless Spectator: Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies, by Sarah Keller Joshua Heaps July 2020 Book Reviews In a recent blog post for Columbia University Press – “Anxious Afterthoughts on Anxious Cinephilia” – Sarah Keller provides her latest book with a casual addendum, addressing film in the age of Coronavirus to u...
Wise, Robert Adrian Schober April 2020 Great Directors Robert Earl Wise b. 10 September, 1914, Winchester, Indiana, USA d. 14 September, 2005, Westwood, Los Angeles, USA Wise is varied. He seems able to do almost anything … – Arthur Knight. In his influentia...
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom as Pasolini’s Film on Film Jeremy Carr April 2020 Feature Articles As a scathing indictment of the violence and debauchery revealed during the fascist reign of 1940s Italy, it is unparalleled. As a grotesquely perceptive commentary on the extremes of consumerist culture, it is...
“Mesdames, mesdemoiselles, messieurs: un classique!”: Eric Rohmer’s Film Theory (1948-1953) – From ‘École Scherer’ to ‘Politique des Auteurs’ by Marco Grosoli Jeremi Szaniawski October 2019 Book Reviews In 1987, when his book, which serves as one of the first efforts in English to reassess and appraise the films and legacy of Roberto Rossellini (1987), was first released, Peter Brunette pointed to the dearth o...
Invested in Expression or in Its Destruction?: The Politics of Space and Representation in Chantal Akerman’s Cinema (Issue 64, September 2012) Zain Jamshaid October 2019 Highlights from 20 years of Senses of Cinema Originally published in Senses of Cinema issue 64, September 2012. The objective of this article is to examine the hyperrealist, feminist tactics of Chantal Akerman’s early 1970s films Jeanne Dielman, 23 Qua...
Divine Dog Shit: John Waters and Disruptive Queer Humour in Film (Issue 80, September 2016) Stuart Richards October 2019 Highlights from 20 years of Senses of Cinema Originally published in Senses of Cinema issue 80, September 2016. John Waters is an icon of queer cinema, known for his use of grossness and bad taste. However, it is not grotesqueness alone that makes quee...
The Terence Davies Trilogy (Terence Davies, 1976/1980/1983) Martyn Bamber October 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film The autobiographical films of Terence Davies are not simply nostalgic journeys into the director’s past; they are piercing insights into the filmmaker’s turbulent early life. While Distant Voices, Still Lives (...
Joseph Kilián (Pavel Juráček & Jan Schmidt, 1963) Darragh O’Donoghue July 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film Much of the visual lexicon we associate with the term ‘Kafkaesque’ was established by Orson Welles’ adaptation of The Trial (1962) and Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt’s Postava k podpírání (Joseph Kilián, 1963), ...
Klapisch, Cédric Ben McCann March 2019 Great Directors b. 4 September 1961, Neuilly-sur-Seine Filmography Further Reading “All of (Klapisch’s films) are solid mainstream entertainments with sprawling casts, intersecting storylines and a strong sense of pla...
Total Cinema: Or, “What is VR?” Raqi Syed March 2019 Feature Articles In the late 1980s, throughout the ‘90s, and well into the 2000s, MIT Principle Research Scientist, Gloriana Davenport investigated the idea that movies had begun to operate as a kind of new “elastic” media. She...
Les cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959) Anthony Frajman March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film In many ways, the Nouvelle Vague began with Claude Chabrol. Not only was he instrumental in assisting his Cahiers du Cinéma colleagues’ early productions, and his own Le beau serge (1958) the first full-length ...
Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955) Rahul Hamid March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film A panting woman hurtles down a highway, wearing only a trenchcoat. A man in a speeding sports car careens toward her: a near collision. Unexpectedly, he picks her up – then cut to credits, in reverse scroll. Th...
Women as Prey: Les bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster March 2019 CTEQ Annotations on Film Claude Chabrol is often called the French Hitchcock, but, to my mind, Chabrol is the far more provocative director, because of his brutal honesty about the hopelessness of human behaviour in a patriarchal world...
World Poll 2018 – Part 2 the editors January 2019 World Poll ENTRIES IN PART 2: Thomas Caldwell Michael Campi Nicolas Carrasco Michael J. Casey Celluloid Liberation Front Jeremy Chamberlin Daryl Chin Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn Roberta Ciabarra Adam Cook Jesús...
“The Film is the Sweat”: An Interview with João Moreira Salles Marco Abel December 2018 Latin American Cinema Today: An Unsolved Paradox Late in one of the greatest filmic encounters with what scholars have started to conceptualise as the “long 1968,” we listen to a voiceover (VO) calmly narrating the gradual disappearance of one of the film’s p...
An Unsentimental Education: Children in the Films of Jacques Doillon Joanna Di Mattia October 2018 The Second Generation: French Cinema After the New Wave An adult tries to comfort the four-year-old girl whose grief and confusion at her mother’s sudden death provides Jacques Doillon’s Ponette (1996) with its narrative and emotional contours. She tells Ponette (Vi...
Courting Disaster: Unromantic Entanglements and Warped Affections in André Téchiné’s Post-New Wave Cinema Glenn Heath Jr. October 2018 The Second Generation: French Cinema After the New Wave Polish-German director Ernst Lubitsch was known for infusing his subversive comedies with an effervescent sexiness and class. Studio marketers branded this invisible style “The Lubitsch Touch”, compiling multit...
The Imitation Game: Jean Eustache’s My Little Loves Stefan Solomon October 2018 The Second Generation: French Cinema After the New Wave “I read a book about this guy’s high school years. He said his French professor really made him sick. When he lectured about passion in the works of Racine and Corneille, he said the same things year after year...
Paul Vecchiali, a Cinematic Franc-Tireur Daniel Fairfax October 2018 The Second Generation: French Cinema After the New Wave Critic at Cahiers du cinéma, filmmaker, globally recognised auteur. The trajectory is a familiar one, particularly for a French cinephile born in 1930, and thus belonging to the same generation as François Truf...
A Ferocious Modesty: Benoît Jacquot’s The Wings of the Dove David Melville October 2018 The Second Generation: French Cinema After the New Wave They flourished their masks, the independent pair, as they might have flourished Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing them; but the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been ...
The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci, 1968) Brad Weismann June 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film Darryl F. Zanuck hated it. After the masterful American producer screened the relentlessly downbeat, anti-capitalist spaghetti Western Il grande silenzio (The Great Silence, Sergio Corbucci, 1968), he refused t...
Speaking of the Dead Tony McKibbin June 2018 Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia Cinema certainly has many films that are happy to fall under the nostalgic, and even has plenty of devices to convey it. The use of songs from the period, a fond voice-over recollecting in tranquillity, the tri...
Thinking about Celine and Jesse: Travelling through time with The Before Trilogy Joanna Di Mattia June 2018 Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia * The last time I saw France, I caught a train alone from Paris to Lyon. I ate a ham and cheese baguette, drank a bottle of Orangina, and flicked absently between magazines, writing in my journal, and reading ...
La Peau douce Dan Harper March 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film La Peau douce (1964 France 113 mins) Source: NLA/ACMI Prod Co: Les Films du Carrosse/SEDIF/SIMAR Dir: François Truffaut Scr: François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard Phot: Raoul Coutard Ed: Claudine Bouché Mus:...
Fahrenheit 451 Laura Carroll March 2018 CTEQ Annotations on Film Fahrenheit 451 (1966 Britain 111 mins) Source: NFVLS Prod Co: Anglo Enterprises/Vineyard Prod: Lewis M. Allen Dir: François Truffaut Scr: François Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, from the book by Ray Bradbury ...
Welcome to Issue 86 of our journal the editors March 2018 Editorial To coincide with the Wonderland exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image running in Melbourne from 5 April to 7 October, we are thrilled to have collaborated with ACMI on a dossier focusing on t...
Ophuls, Max Jeremy Carr December 2017 Great Directors 6 May, 1902, Saarbrücken, Germany d. 26 March, 1957, Hamburg, Germany Like the elaborate camera manoeuvres that enrich his multinational filmography, the career of Max Ophuls has been one of dynamic fluctuati...