Features

By Ken Chen. Susan Sontag once called transparency – the luminousness of the thing in itself – the highest value in contemporary film. By this, she meant the way Renoir and Ozu remind us of life. What then should we make of the occluded films of Eugène Green, which invoke […]

By Gary Bettinson. In 1967, movie actor Warren Beatty assumed the mantle of producer with Bonnie and Clyde. His decision to harness greater production responsibility not only coincided with a pivotal shift in Hollywood’s history; it also contributed to this shift, establishing Beatty as a significant force in Hollywood’s changing […]

By Christopher Sharrett. It seems to me that Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) is an important film (it is too soon to say if it is anything like a great one), at the very least for its sense of the fading, threatened male hero as a representation of […]

By Celluloid Liberation Front. “If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.” African proverb The recent urban unrest that shook the already shaky scaffoldings of English society – sugar-coated with viral advertising yet hardly reassuring – recurs at a […]

By Alexander Kirschenbaum. ‘Am I different somehow? Is it live or is it Memorex?’ (Seth Brundle [Jeff Goldblum] in David Cronenberg’s The Fly [1986]) For the purposes of this article, ‘metamorphosis cinema’ refers to a specific canon of 1980s-produced feature films that are about transitional physical states, about the grotesque […]

By Joacim Blomqvist. The Swedish general elections of September 2010, confirmed that Sweden is becoming a less tolerant society in many ways. For the first time a xenophobic nationalist party entered the parliament of a country that has long been perceived, in an international perspective, as a transparent and democratic […]

By Larry Portis. This article was originally published in Film International 46, vol. 8, no. 4, 2010. We republish it here in homage to our most valued and missed collaborator Larry Portis who passed away suddenly on June 4, 2011. Read Part 1 here. In the first part of my […]

  By Larry Portis. This article was originally published in Film International 44, vol. 8, no. 2, 2010. We republish it here in homage to our most valued and missed collaborator Larry Portis who passed away suddenly on June 4, 2011, age 67. Read Part 2 here. The great political […]

By Jez Owen. Abstract Documentary suggests ‘fullness and completion, knowledge and fact’ (Nichols, 1994:1). A documentary text can provide a representation of life that an audience will read as a truthful expression of an actuality. The last fifteen years of film production have witnessed an explosion in the number of […]

By Moira Sullivan. In northeastern Italy lies the autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia.  “Friulan”, a romance dialect, is spoken in Friuli. Casarsa della Delizia is one of the towns of the area and is where the mother of Pier Paolo Pasolini was born. During the Second World War, the Italian poet […]