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 […]
Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression: A 2-part article
By Robin Wood. Part 1: Introduction and Chocolat. Introduction: Claire Denis and Nadine Gordimer. The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. That is where we begin. (Nadine Gordimer, Introduction to Selected Stories, 1975*). I discovered the films of Claire Denis and the […]
Permanent State of War: A Short History of North Korean Cinema
By Johannes Schönherr. Like the leading article in the Party paper, the cinema should have mass appeal and should keep ahead of new developments, thus playing a mobilizing role in each stage of the revolutionary struggle. – Kim Il Sung I. 7th Pyongyang Film Festival of Non-Aligned and Other Developing […]
The Way of a Gaucho: The Career of Hugo Fregonese
By Santiago & Andrés Rubín de Celis. Very little has been written by critics and film reviewers in the English language about the films of the Argentinean director Hugo Fregonese. His Hollywood years, from 1950 to 1956, including a whole of eleven films, were only a short period within his […]
Hollywood and the Nordic Cinemas: upcoming issue
March 30, 2011
With our first issue of the year on its way from the printers, here’s a few words of what you can expect in no. 2. It’s a special issue on the relationship between Hollywod and the Nordic cinemas. This is how the guest editors themselves, Pietari Kääpä and Tommy Gustafsson, […]
Visual Representations of Disconnection in Ichikawa Kon’s An Actor’s Revenge
By Daniel Gronsky. An Actor’s Revenge(Yukinojo Henge, 1963) is one of director Ichikawa Kon’s more infrequently remarked upon films. Despite the exceptional quality of the film, An Actor’s Revenge is often passed over in favor of examining Ichikawa’s earlier, more popular works, such as Conflagration (Enjo, 1958), Fires on the […]
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am an oilman’: There Will Be Blood
By Bryan Nixon. I cling to films that strive to reach the cinematic outer limits, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now, and 8 1/2; I dare say that There Will Be Blood is one of those films. It is a film defining corruption and greed that tears apart […]
Bumbling Towards Ecstacy: Man on Wire
By Deirdre Devers. Truth really is stranger than fiction. Our 21st century mediascape is saturated with personal and very public spectacles that are so commonplace as to become low wattage visual fodder. There’s the live coverage of David Blaine’s test of endurance whilst frozen in a block of ice in […]
Real Queer Arabs
March 26, 2011
By Omar Hassan. In the post-Brokeback Mountain era of film-making, cinematic representations of homosexuality no longer conjure up lengthy debate or public controversy. Producers have developed the assumption that the LGBT community (who are generally believed to possess a higher disposable income) are hungry for media to consume. As such, […]