By Ryan Prout. For three days in October 2008, Cardiff was host to the Iris Prize, one of the highlights on the international calendar of LGBT film festivals. Bigger, better, and brighter, the 2008 event included UK premieres of Antonio Hen’s Clandestinos (2007), Todd Stephens’s Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone […]
The French Old Wave: Claude Sautet’s Classe tous risques
January 1, 2009
By Tim Palmer. Commemorated widely, the French New Wave is basking in the afterglow of its fiftieth anniversary. Few today dispute the resonance of this movement—its guerilla modes of production, its intellectual auteurs, its playfully non-traditional aesthetics, its joyous cinephilia. But despite all the nostalgia, it is worth remembering that […]
Tarkovsky, Nathan Dunne, ed., (2008)
A book review by Tim Palmer. Black Dog’s new compendium of essays on the great Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, belongs in a fairly recent category of film studies titles, intellectual coffee-table books or prestige books, which offer themselves as comprehensive, even definitive works. These are literally and figuratively weighty tomes, […]
Judex (1963) & Nuits rouges (1974)
By Anton Bitel. At first glance Judex (1963) and Nuits rouges (1974)might seem like chalk and cheese. One is in black and white with a marked interest in orthochromatic effects, the other is in vivid seventies colour. One is a period film whose use of intertitles and irising mimics the […]
Inland Empire (2006)
By Bryan Nixon. David Lynch’s latest dream-like film Inland Empire (2006), a three-hour experimental epic that resembles a house of mirrors, is certainly his most ambitious and abstract. The director of daring masterworks such as Blue Velvet (1986) has pieced together yet another film that cannot be analyzed in terms […]
Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film, Yana Hashamova, (2007)
Book review by Daria Kabanova. Yana Hashamova’s short, but engaging volume brings together psychoanalysis, cultural studies and film to examine the challenges to the post-Soviet Russian national identity that the fall of the Soviet Union brought about. Hashamova constructs a very elegant methodological framework for approaching the issue at stake, […]
Les Enfants terribles: An Interview with Françoise Marie
By Tim Palmer and Liza Palmer. The recent work of Françoise Marie explores a child-centered view of the world. Setting up a series of improvised games, then filming the results with little or no intervention, her films show young children re-enacting, from their perspective, the actions of adults in their […]
La Vie en Richmond | VCU French Film Festival, 28–30 March 2008
By Liza Palmer and Tim Palmer. Travelling through the Carytown area of Richmond, Virginia, the weekend of 28–30 March 2008, one would not suspect that recent relations between the United States and France had been anything but rosy. Lampposts were festooned with French flags. Local bistros and bakeries promised delectable […]
Silence (Chinmoku, 1971)
By Anton Bitel. In Japan, Christianity is a minority religion of only marginal significance to the nation’s culture, and accordingly Japanese films that focus on Christianity tend to do so as a means to an end. While Norifumi Suzuki’s nunsploitation shocker School of the Holy Beast (Seiju gakuen, 1974), for […]
Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion: Beast Stable (Joshuu sasori: Kemono-beya, 1973)
By Anton Bitel. If ever proof were needed that genre is what you make of it, then one only need look to Japan’s ‘pink’ cinema of the 1970s, where the lowest of exploitation subgenres was being approached with the highest of artistic sensibilities, disinterring unexpectedly exquisite treasures from the trash. […]