By Martin Smith. Despite increased transparency and liberalisation at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) in recent decades, Britain remains one of the most censorious democratic countries in the world. Annette Kuhn’s model of censorship, outlined in her Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality: 1909-1925, details censorship as a process “produced […]
Lost in Space
By Rajko Radovic. “I’m gonna wait till the stars come out. And see them twinkle in your eyes. I’m gonna wait till the midnight hour.” (Wilson “the Wicked” Pickett) “Nature has thrown away the key; and woe unto that fateful curiosity that might once manage to peer out through a […]
“Isn’t it Bromantic?” – The Whole Damn Sony Mess, and What It Means
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Now that some time has elapsed between the Sony hack and the release of the film that apparently precipitated it, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s The Interview (2014), there are more than a few lessons to take away from the entire affair not only in the […]
The Best of 2014 – and the Most Overrated
By Film International. Another film year has come to an end and it’s time to sum up. Here are the films that some of the current and former members of the Film International editorial team particularly liked this year. And those that we found particularly – annoyingly – overrated. As […]
Tati Time: Criterion Delivers The Complete Jacques Tati
December 28, 2014
By Jeremy Carr. Aside from his general lack of recognition as one of film history’s great comedians, the most tragic part of Jacques Tati’s working life is his minimal output (indeed the two are probably connected). On the positive side of things though, while Tati directed just six feature films, […]
“A Giant Gutter in Outer Space”: On the Schopenhauerian Themes of HBO’s hit series True Detective
By Mathijs Peters. Introduction Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which Samuel Beckett defined as “an intellectual justification of unhappiness – the greatest that has ever been attempted” (Büttner 2002: 115), has perhaps had a more profound and long-lasting influence on artists than on philosophers. Even though his thought played an extremely important […]
The Radical Film Network: for sustainable, oppositional film culture
By Steve Presence. “Today we do not really have any ‘centralized’ hubs like Indymedia anymore. What we do have is a proliferation of independent media collectives that are all more or less working in the same direction but that nevertheless remain relatively scattered.” (Jerome Roos, ROAR Magazine Manifesto, 2013) “We […]
Five Iranian Voices on Reza Mirkarimi’s Today
COLLECTED AND INTRODUCED BY AMIR GANJAVIE. Reza Mirkarimi’s Today (Emrooz, 2014) was selected to represent Iran at the 2015 Oscars despite being unpopular with Iranian critics from the beginning and despite expectations that it would be a great box office failure. According to the website of Hamshari, a leading Iranian […]
“Turn It Off!” – Sound and Silence in 1960s British Gothic Cinema
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. It’s Halloween once again, and as one might suspect, American cable networks are offering a cornucopia of horror films, past and present, though the Universal films of the 1930s and 40s which started the entire horror cycle in America are now missing from most playlists. Val […]
The Representation of Men in the Films of Abdol Reza Kahani, Houman Seyedi and Bahram Tavakoli
By Asal Bagheri. [Editor’s note: This essay is published here in conjunction with the publication of Film International 69, vol. 12, no. 3/2014, a special issue devoted to Contemporary Independent Iranian Cinema.] In an interview made in August 2013, Bahram Tavakoli declared that in his opinion, independent cinema does not […]