By Bibi Berki. Griffith’s singular essay about the future of the cinema is a far more complex and layered piece than might seem immediately obvious.” It’s a risky business playing the soothsayer. Nonetheless, the director DW Griffith had a crack at it in 1924 with a magazine article called The […]
Interdependent Elements: An Interview with Iranian Film Editor Haideh Safiyari
By Ali Moosavi. In the first place, you must be very patient…. You should know that it is a very difficult and time-consuming job and can affect your health. Meanwhile, you should be sensitive to the social issues in your environment and learn from other forms of art, too.” When […]
The Quiet Girl and Reflections on the Season
By Christopher Sharrett. The conclusion of the film makes a basic point: the biological family is often inauthentic, the authentic family a matter of individual will, with affection created by need, and a deep kinship not often subject to accidents of flesh.” Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl wasn’t ignored during […]
“Sin Lust Evil” in America: Louise Brooks and the Exhibition History of Pandora’s Box (1929)
By Thomas Gladysz. Though celebrated today, Pandora’s Box experienced one of the more troubled exhibition histories of just about any film of its time.” Today, Pandora’s Box is considered one of the great films of the silent era, as well as a masterpiece of Weimar cinema. It is still regularly […]
Broken Windows: Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York
A Book Review by John Talbird. A sound, focused, and thorough examination of a fairly compressed period of time.” On October 30, 1975, New York’s Daily News ran an article with the banner headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Of course, President Gerald Ford never said such a thing, few […]
Approaching the Unknowable “Others” – Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters: Bad Behavior on American Television
A Book Review by M. Sellers Johnson. While Diffrient advances contemporary television scholarship…readers will also find this book to be light, entertaining, and likely relatable to modern TV consumers’ apparent affinity for dubious moral ethics.” Within our televised small screens and the world they inhabit, bad behavior persists in social […]
The Lost Burlesque Auteur: The Films of Lillian Hunt
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. What remains so striking about Hunt’s films is how openly both they and their supporting promotional material clearly sought to appeal to a female audience, well beyond the cliché of the porn-consuming scopophilic male.” While American burlesque cinema flourished in popularity during in the 1940s and 1950s, […]
Tyranny and the Canon: Problems in Todd Field’s Tár
By Christopher Sharrett. As a way of addressing woke culture, it has precious little to say, especially as it irresponsibly conflates the culture with sexual predation, a glaringly different matter, unless the film is aimed at those with grievances about women having too much power…. There is so little music […]
Sonic Violence: Cinematic Rape, Sound, and the Body in Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, 1976)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Lipstick stands as a largely underrated film when it comes to the often complex representation of the male rapist in fictional film. Sound often plays second fiddle to the supremacy of the visual in cinema… yet as this example indicates, it can play a significant part in […]
Out to Pasture: Nicholas Winding Refn’s Copenhagen Cowboy (Netflix Series, 2023)
By James Slaymaker. A glacially paced revenge-thriller which deliberately denies the audience any sense of tension, excitement or catharsis.” It’s remarkable to think that a scant decade ago, Nicolas Winding Refn was tipped to be the next major player in international art cinema. The rapturous reception of Drive (2011) represented […]