By Geoffrey Fox. The credits roll over a black-and-white newsreel of missiles and men parading before an austere Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow on the 52nd anniversary of the October Revolution. A leap in time and place, and we see as through a car window the sepia and rust-brown hulks and […]
Discovering Mary Pickford
By Tony Williams. The title of this article has a double meaning. It is primarily a reworking of that lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched 1999 publication Mary Pickford Rediscovered written by someone (Kevin Brownlow) who already knew her work and had the privilege of once meeting the 70 plus year-old […]
“Thinking as Negation”: Adorno, Vertigo, and the Paradoxical Promise of Popular Cinema
By Benjamin Bergholtz. “Each single manifestation of the culture industry inescapably reproduces human beings as what the whole has made them.” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002 [Dialectic of Enlightenment]: 99) Few critics have sought to bring the ideas of Theodor Adorno to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In itself, this is […]
The Agony of Woman in Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
By Christopher Sharrett. Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is a work of such staggering importance that its significance to its own culture (Israel), certainly relevant, is secondary to its challenge to the essentials of patriarchy, and all power systems within it. The most important art […]
The Pictures of a Lady: In Praise of Grace Kelly
May 18, 2015
By Daniel Garrett. Some old films have a special appeal. They might not be excellent or particularly beloved objects, and yet they have something that sustains our attention. When I saw Mogambo (1953), I found the love triangle in it interesting even as I recognized its familiarity: an honest rogue […]
Motherhood and Mourning in Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Unknown Woman
By Francesco Pascuzzi. Already with the film’s title, Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta, 2005) sets out to toy with the audience’s perspective and its perception of the lead character Irena (Ksenia Rappoport). When the protagonist arrives in town[1] and lands herself some menial work in an upscale residential […]
Un Flic: Melville and the Ambiguities
By Tony Williams. On initial release, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Un Flic (1972) disappointed many and has remained in critical limbo to the present day. Despite growing appreciation of its visual style, the reasons why the director adopted such an ambiguous and seemingly incoherent approach still remain mysterious. Any film that followed […]
Stand, Men of the West! The Battle for Middle-earth (and Britain)
By Laura Crossley. “You’ve enjoyed the film, so now what are you going to do about the message? Tolkien didn’t just write The Lord of the Rings for fun, you know. He wrote it to inspire people, to make people understand that – faced with bad government and threats to […]
Radical Film-Making and Digital Paradox: the case of The Fourth Estate
By Elizabeth Mizon and Lee Salter. Digital media technologies are full of paradoxes. On one hand they are said to open up new opportunities, a “democratisation” of media, but on the other they are said to consolidate not just media power, but also the ideological frameworks that constrain critical creative […]
The Trials of Love, Justice, and Prejudice: Tom Hanks and Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia
By Daniel Garrett. In the film Philadelphia (1993), written by Ron Nyswaner and directed by Jonathan Demme, the actor Tom Hanks is impressive for being able to incarnate several perspectives in one man – states of health and malady, youth and sudden age, but also the public and private man, […]