By Kierran Horner. The opening sequence of Resnais’ latest film is an abstract one; a non-narrative medium-shot of a tower in a field, disused one assumes, into which the camera passes, through a blackened doorway. From this blackout, an edit posits us in close-up above a crack in a road […]
A Minor Buñuel: Susana
By Kierran Horner. Susana (1951) is a minor Buñuel film, even within the scope of his comparatively weak Mexican period, as director for hire. A melodrama, ostensibly in the moralistic mould of Hogarth’s ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ say, it plots the brief rise and re-descent of its eponymous, sexually-suffused anti-heroine. Depicted […]
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 BANANAS!* story
By Daniel Lindvall. With the controversial documentary Bananas!*finally getting its official US premiere, in New York, 8 May, 2011, we republish here our editorial from Film International 41, vol. 7, no. 5, 2009, which sums up the story, up until that time, of the multinational Dole corporations lawsuit against the […]
‘The Zespol System assured a partial autonomy to our cineastes’: an interview with Krzysztof Zanussi
May 1, 2011
By Giuseppe Sedia. According to a decision recently voted by the Polish Senate, the remaining state-owned film studios are due to be privatized by 2013. This provision will affect 11 companies including the studio TOR headed by Krzysztof Zanussi. Since the aftermath of the events of 1989, Poland has not […]
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. […]
CinemAfrica 2: Outside the Law
By Daniel Lindvall. With Outside the Law (Hors-la-loi, 2010; an Algerian, French, Belgian and Tunisian co-production) director and co-writer Rachid Bouchareb follows up his Days of Glory (Indigènes, 2006). The latter film dealt with the discrimination against North African colonial soldiers fighting for France in World War Two. After a […]
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 […]