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 […]
Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror: On Political Film in Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema
By Sara Saljoughi. [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.] The cinema of Jafar Panahi highlights two crucial strains of the problematic of Iranian independent cinema: the conditions […]
The Malick Illusion: Perceptual segmentation in The Thin Red Line
By Luis Antunes Rocha. “The image, in terms of sound, always has the basic nature of a question. Fundamental to the cinema experience, therefore, is a process – which we might call sound hermeneutic – whereby the sound asks where? and the image responds here!” (Altman 1980: 74) “With the […]
Toward the Limit: Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction
By Carol Vernallis. Michael Bay poses a problem. He is the second-highest-grossing director, after Spielberg, so it’s not surprising that critics and connoisseurs love to take him down. But neither supporters nor detractors have been able to say exactly what he does. Is he just good at making Hollywood blockbuster […]
Santo in the Museum of the Mexican Film Industry
September 8, 2014
By John Burns. It seems that a number of historians and critics of Mexican film would be happier if the films starring lucha libre wrestler Santo had never been produced. One British university’s website on Mexican cinema called the Santo films “invariably stupid.” In Carl J. Mora’s exhaustive study of […]