By Christopher Sharrett. I hesitated as I began this essay, chiefly because I came across some interviews with Derek Cianfrance, whose work is the subject of these remarks. What he has to say struck me as banal, or immature, or conservative, particularly in his expression of a yearning for the […]
Spaces of Resistance: Film Festivals and Anti-Capitalism
By Anthony Killick. Film festivals have always operated as nodes in a network of global power relations. Set within this field of social and economic tensions, they act as spaces in which our view of the world is formed through our interaction with films. The ways in which these spaces […]
The Best Years of Our Lives: a Revaluation
By Christopher Sharrett. While writing an essay on the post-Vietnam film Rolling Thunder, I thought of William Wyler’s much-applauded 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives, about three veterans returning at the close of World War II. I revisit this film often, but as much as I appreciate it […]
The Disquieting Aura of Fabián Bielinsky
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “I said no to Hollywood. There you have no freedom to create.” (Bielinsky to Federico Fahsbender) “Film audiences won’t find in [The Aura] an accessible or agreeable story. Also, the film doesn’t show a bit of sympathy or good intentions for any of the […]
Family Friendly Torture Porn
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen The corpse is a new personality Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen The corpse is a new personality.” (Gang of Four, “5:45,” from the album Entertainment! [1979]) Television shows such as I Was Impaled (2012-) and […]
Re-Birth of a Nation or Why Django Has More to Say about Contemporary America than the Other “Historically Accurate” Films
By Celluloid Liberation Front “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.” (D.W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation) “A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves… A war of this kind must be conducted on […]
The Shining 2.0 or: How New Media Changed Film Analysis
By Hampus Hagman. In Iron Man 2 (2010), Tony Stark discovers that his deceased father has left behind coded sketches for a revolutionary new element that could not be realized during his lifetime due to technological limitations. It is up to the son to decode these and use the means […]
Zero Dark Thirty: Embarrassed No More
By Christopher Sharrett. I write this comment on Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty more out of a sense of moral obligation and outrage rather than as an evaluation of a serious work. I find nothing at all to recommend this film, so impoverished is it at every political, moral, aesthetic, […]
The Future Catches Up With The Past: Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “Targets are people…and you could be one of them!” (Tagline for Targets) Peter Bogdanovich got his start as a critic and historian, conducting interviews with some of cinema’s most illustrious directors in their twilight years, which were published first in a variety of books and magazines, […]
Rolling Thunder and the Poverty of the Vietnam Cinema
By Christopher Sharrett. I recently happened upon a very good Studio Canal DVD of the John Flynn/Paul Schrader film Rolling Thunder (1977). The film, of some distinction at least as a symptom of profound problems within US ideology in the 70s, has always been to me, in Norman Mailer’s words, […]