By Daniel Lindvall. What’s the difference between a comedian who joked about goat-fucking, dirty-bearded Muslims in 1975 and one who does the same in 2012? The first one was racist, the latter only ironic. That’s why we can now laugh ourselves silly at the same amusing stereotype, since we are really laughing only at our [...]
Cinema’s Civil War Sesquicentennial: Top twelve histories filmed with lightning Why so many cinematic/TV works about the War Between the States? Why has this genre attracted vast audiences and enjoyed enduring popularity? From plantations to Harpers Ferry to Fort Sumter to Gettysburg to Appomattox Courthouse to Lincoln’s assassination, Civil War cinema/TV runs the gamut, striking [...]
By Celluloid Liberation Front. ‘One can look forward to future contests, their outcome by no means predetermined, since problems that seem insurmountable today will yield to the more complex intelligence of children still playing ball in the parks of the world.’ (Amos Vogel, 1974.) The following (confused) thoughts and many questions are somehow related to [...]
The New Romanian Cinema between the tragic and the ironic The Death of Mr Lăzărescu (the second film by Cristi Puiu), is without a doubt the paradigmatic, even programmatic work of the Romanian New Wave. With its austere classical aesthetics, it separates radically the past of Romanian auteur cinema – highly metaphorical – from its [...]
By Deirdre O’Neill. The Cinema Museum in London is remaining true to its ongoing attempt to cater for lovers of film whose needs are not met by the multiplex. The Museum is joining forces with Little Joe magazine and the Rio Cinema in Dalston to launch ‘A Little Film Club’, which over the next six [...]
FILM INTERNATIONAL 54: Late Hollywood Silent Film Melodrama In May 2006 I experienced my own upheaval, my own bardo of calamity. It was the result of being fired from a full-time teaching position I held at a Catholic college preparatory high school. In short: the new principal, an energetic Texan, having only learned of my [...]
By Rajko Radovic. A trip up the river ends with a strange voice that pulls you in and doesn’t let go. You might feel that you’re becoming a victim of some sort of feverish delusion, connected with the tropical environment. It is precisely this unsettling river-voice that seems to hover ominously over the immaculate decorum [...]
Evicting The Tenant The certainty of our comfort rests on what we can exclude from it. My reading of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant centres on the violence of identifying the ‘trespasser’ and requires that we reconsider our entitlement to name, judge, exclude and attack those whom we perceive as outsiders. Their outsider status confirms that [...]
By Deirdre O’Neill. The horror film genre has never enjoyed the respectable status of other genres such as the western or the thriller, rather, it has, to a greater or lesser extent, remained the property of the committed fan and cult film devotee. Indeed, one of the pleasures in watching horror movies is knowing that [...]
By Deirdre O’Neill. For the next six months as part of its ongoing fundraising effort The Cinema Museum is hosting a season of French films that will, hopefully, provide a snapshot of French cinema over the last 80 years. The programme has been curated by Jon Davies and will screen work from the Lumiere brothers [...]