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 […]
The Heroism of Disobedience and Deceit: Where Is the Friend’s Home?
By Robin Wood. Introduction Kiarostami’s development has been remarkably swift, each stage marked by radical change. Essentially, he has moved from a traditional ‘realist’ narrative cinema, strongly influenced by Italian neo-realism. through various intermediate stages, to an experimental formalism. The shifts are by no means arbitrary: all his work, […]
Louise Brooks: The Martyrdom of Lulu
By Dan Callahan. In the long last years of her life, Louise Brooks, isolated in Rochester, New York and utterly tired of living, would end telephone conversations with the order, “Bring a gun.” Her friends were shocked by this macabre request, which must have delighted her. Even as an elderly […]
Against and For Irreversible
By Robin Wood. To call Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible(Irréversible, 2002) controversial would be an understatement. It has had its defenders, but their voices have been largely drowned out by the rage the film has aroused, with horror stories of mass walkouts at the Cannes Festival screening, and subsequent denunciations by critics […]
Dark Shadows around Pinewood and Ealing
By Robert Murphy. The Ever-growing Empire of Film Noir The critical concept of film noir, once confined to atmospheric American thrillers and crime films like The Woman in the Window (1944), Double Indemnity (1944), Out of the Past (1947), Gilda (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and The Postman Always […]