Features

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, […]

By Ian Olney. Over the past decade or so, the Spanish horror film has undergone a striking renaissance. During the final years of the Franco regime, in the 1960s and 1970s, horror cinema flourished in Spain, producing such genre icons as Jess Franco, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Amando de Ossorio, and […]

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Alice Guy is a filmmaker whose body of work is still a site of contestation for modern critics; after all these years, her name is nearly unknown. Yet her output was prodigious. Of the nearly four hundred films Guy directed between 1896 and 1920, Guy has […]

By Shashank Saurav. “Sometimes they think the way we work is very stylish and romantic, but actually it’s the way we can survive and make the films. We can work with the things that we get, but not the things we wish we had.” (Wong Kar-wai) Hong Kong is a […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “There was a character that hung out in a clock called Froggy, the Magic Gremlin, and they used to say to him, ‘Plunk your Magic Twanger, Froggy!’ There was something about the character that bothered me, and I can recall having some weird dreams because of […]

By Christopher Sharrett. It amazes me that so few reviewers noted emphatically that Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (2012), like his earlier 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (2007), is a film about women, about the oppression of women, in an era that constantly rolls back the rights of women […]