By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Betty White has always been ahead of her time. This has been both a blessing and a curse. Most people, even scholars who specialize in television history, have little to no knowledge of the importance of Betty White in early live television, in the invention of […]
Inside The Asylum: The Outlaw Studio That Changed Hollywood
July 25, 2013
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “Anyone can make a $100 million dollar movie, but to shoot a feature film in 12-14 days, with a budget that’s probably less than the phone bill on a major studio film is monumental. To do it every four weeks and then release the film three […]
The Politics of Critical Reception and the Marxist Feminist Sublime in Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux
July 8, 2013
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.” (Luis Buñuel 2013: 174) I’m always attracted to films that cause an uproar, critical polarization, […]
The Eternal Father: Two Films by Derek Cianfrance
June 17, 2013
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 […]