By John Caps. Some seasons ago, Lincoln Center’s Film Comment magazine published an annotated survey of the history of Hollywood film music, “Soundtracks 101.” There I took readers from the beginning of descriptive/narrative soundtrack scoring in 1933’s King Kong through latter day experiments in sight/sound correlation like Waking Life where […]
From Short Story to Film to Autobiography: Bergman’s Intermedial Variations
By Maaret Koskinen. (These are excerpts from In the Beginning Was the Word: Ingmar Bergman and His Early Writings [Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2002], originally published in Film International 1, vol. 1. no. 1, 2003.) One autumn a few years ago the author of this article was in the process […]
Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman’s ‘The Silence’ vs. Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger’
By John Orr. The Silence(Tystnaden) (1962) and The Passenger(1974) are two of the great modernist films of their period, and two of the most enduring. From the standpoint of a new century neither is dated and both are richly rewarded by DVD rewatching. Yet their genesis lies in a previous […]
You Don’t Know What Love Is
By Daniel Garrett. The book Annie Proulx’s short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is amazing: detailed, observant, naturalistic and smart, it is a story about men and land and love and society – in Wyoming, a state of mountains and valleys, greenlands and deserts. Annie Proulx’s language is mostly spare, though a […]
Let’s Kill the Moonlight in Electric Park: a Futuristic Interpretation of Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dear Wendy
By Angela Tumini. Introduction There were times in Europe when the traditions of the past were thrown aside and rejected in favor of the spirit of experimentation, and when manifestos were a recurrent avant-gardist feature expressed in extreme rhetoric, intended for shock value in order to achieve a revolutionary effect. […]
Jake’s Addiction: Dances with Smurfs vs. the Tweedle Dummies and the Proof of Artificial Gods
By Dustin Griffin. In Avatar, it is easier to believe in the marriage and integration of living and non-living and the world that was created a lot more than other contemporary CGI fests like say Alice. This is due to how the creative team structured the visuals and the storyline. […]
Animation Comes to Life: Anthropomorphism & Wall-E
By Nicola Balkind. To read this article, please download the PDF: Animation Comes to Life: Anthropomorphism & Wall-E Nicola Balkind is a freelance film journalist with a BA (Hons) in Film & Media Studies from Stirling University, Scotland.
Slumdogging It: Rebranding the American Dream, New World Orders, and Neo-Colonialism
By William Anselmi and Sheena Wilson. Introduction. The triumph of visual culture in the era of neo-liberal subjugation elicits the following question by default: how are economic processes embedded in political discourses sustained, or resisted, according to visual narratives for global publics/consumers? Slumdog Millionaire(2008) offers a way into this, from […]
Isolationism in Dead Man Walking
By Dustin Griffin, Honorable Mention in the 2006 Frank Capra Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Film Criticism. Dead Man Walking (1995) is about religious faith and the societal issues surrounding the death penalty; the film deconstructs the issue of forgiveness as it is taught in the Old Testament, with its […]