Features

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “With poor and derisory resources, with the help and goodwill of those who have worked with me, I have been able to make my films. I have stolen them, torn them from a place in the shadows rarely offered to the Public, forbidden. My films have […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Max Ophüls, born Maximillian Oppenheimer on 6 May 1902, Saarbrücken, Germany, was a director known primarily for his romance films, often with sweeping tracking shots, and often taking place in the past. Ophüls’ luxurious camera style is evident in such superb romance films as Letter from […]

By Victoria Tickle. Rape-revenge films are a controversial sub-genre of films that have been the subject of many critical debates surrounding feminism, moral issues and ethics, as well as the representations of women, violence and gender roles. Rape-revenge films are often categorised as a sub-genre of other larger and more […]

By Will Dodson. Warner Home Video released a new Blu-ray set of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist on October 8, coinciding with the film’s 40th anniversary. The occasion warrants, I think, a brief revisiting. The set repackages an earlier Blu-ray edition with some new, inconsequential documentary features. Like the earlier release, […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Noël Coward once observed that “television is for appearing on – not for looking at,” but as the twenty-first century takes firm hold of our collective consciousness, it seems that everyone has become, in one form or another, a spectator of the events of everyday existence, […]

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. As an internationally acclaimed Japanese/American artist, Yayoi Kusama rejects any Orientalist assumptions about her work or her self. Yet her playful performances and challenging happenings of the 1960s at times featured images of her wearing the traditional Japanese kimono. Kusama seemingly catered to the audiences of […]

By Jamie Isbell. Charles Burnett’s UCLA thesis feature Killer of Sheep (1977) has become something of a retrospective masterpiece. A cult artifact speaking to one generation from another, and holding ground as one of the most clarified examples of mid-century European film flavours drifting into the cinematic record of black […]

  By Rossella Scalia. My first encounter with the director Elvira Notari occurred randomly, as almost always happens with important meetings. I had never heard of her nor of her many works, although I spent about thirty years of my life in Italy. The fascist censorship has drastically affected the […]

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. I begin, as my title suggests, with a quote from Agnès Godard, the cinematographer of Beau Travail (1999): “The most inexhaustible landscapes for me remain faces and bodies” (Vincentelli  2000: 166). The inexhaustible possibilities for cinematically inhabiting the homoeroticized male body are remarkable in Beau Travail, […]

By Will Dodson. Wes Craven’s Scream 4 is in many ways a fitting capstone to the 9/11 decade, thus the title of this essay, “Rip it up and start again: Scream 4 and Post-?”[1] “Rip it up and start again” is a lyric from the great post-punk band, Orange Juice, […]