By Christopher Sharrett. Vincente Minnelli’s melodrama Tea and Sympathy, finally released on DVDby Warner Archive, deserves revaluation, given its neglect during its long absence from the home video market. Although there have been intelligent comments on the film by Vito Russo (1981: 112) and David Gerstner (2009), it has long been […]
Bloodied Light: The cinema of Martin McDonagh
By Marshall Botvinick. ‘I’m sorry,’ says a somber doctor just as the opening credits for Six Shooter(2005), Martin McDonagh’s first film, dissolve. For a playwright known for his remorseless characters, it is a surprising way to begin a cinematic career, and it sends a clear signal to his viewers that […]
Revisiting Citizen Ruth
By Lesley Brill. Alexander Payne’s 1996 feature film debut, Citizen Ruth, is generally remembered as an incongruously comic look at the struggle between opponents of legal abortion and its defenders in the United States. That’s a topic of perennial importance in American politics, and it’s especially relevant now with the […]
The White Ribbon
By Kierran Horner. The White Ribbon (2009) is about guilt. It is another film by Michael Haneke about guilt. But it would be reductive to suggest that The White Ribbon was something as simple as a macrocosmic, German Hidden (Caché, 2005); an analysis of the guilt felt by a nation […]
Colourful Claims: towards a theory of animated documentary
May 6, 2011
By Jonathan Rozenkrantz. Every film is a documentary. (Bill Nichols 2001) There is no such thing as documentary […]. (Trinh T. Minh-ha 1993) Why bother? When a concept is conceived of in ways so opposed that one scholar will define it in absolute terms and another will deny its existence, […]
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror viewed through Gilles Deleuze’s ‘time-image’
By Kierran Horner. Tarkovsky saw himself as a creator of temporal filmic images. In his published ruminations on film, Sculpting in Time; Reflections on the Cinema, he asserts the creation of a real cinematic picture as: ‘…faithfully recording on film the time which flows on beyond the edges of the […]
The Visual Politics of Class: Silent Film and the Public Sphere
By Steven J. Ross. Why should anyone seriously interested in class care about movies? To answer this, I ask readers to participate in the following exercise: Blurt out the first word that comes to mind when you see the following names: Saddam Hussein; George Bush; Osama bin Laden; Bill Clinton. […]
Genre Films and Cultural Myth
By Barry Keith Grant. In 1957 Francois Truffaut rallied the writers of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma around the radical idea that film making, even in Hollywood, was an art of personal expression, like literature, painting or music. True auteurs were directors whose work was characterized by a […]
False Criticism: Cinema, Bourgeois Society, and the Conservative Complaint
By Christopher Sharrett. As the most extraordinary art form of modernity, the cinema’s great accomplishment has been its subversion of various received truths, from conventional notions of sexuality to the workings of time and space, and the undermining of the very concept of being in the age of relativity. As […]
Ten Zan – Ferdinando Baldi’s Ultimate Mission
The story of an Italian/North Korean action movie joint venture. By Johannes Schönherr. “Amerinda Est. Presents … Frank Zagarino and Mark Gregory in … Ten Zan – The Ultimate Mission … written and directed by Ted Kaplan,” read the movie’s opening credits in bold white letters, superimposed over aerial […]