By Matthew Sorrento. While adapting Alicia Erian’s novel Towelhead for the big screen, Alan Ball considered using the title Nothing is Private. While the idea now sounds like padding, the alternate title would have suited the film well. The lead role, the thirteen-year-old Arab-American Jasira, comes of age sexually under […]
Billboards for Geeks
By Jamie Isbell. How has projection mapping made such an impact on audiences? And, with increasing numbers of brands adopting the advertising method, is it a bright future for the digital delight? Or an already exhausted gimmick destined for a dusty shelf? In plumes of digital fabric the angular relics […]
Istanbul Film Festival Turns 30
By N. Buket Cengiz. The most important event of the year for the cinephiles of Istanbul, the International Istanbul Film Festival, enjoyed its thirtieth birthday this year, featuring two hundred and thirty one films in seven venues and attracting a total of one hundred and fifty thousand viewers. The festival […]
Bin Laden leaves Suddenly
By Rajko Radovic. Bin Laden lies at the bottom of the ocean, yet the jungle of shadowy networks and lethal plots he had left behind is still breathing with the night. His scarred body sleeping with fish is shrouded in mafia style mystery. There is no doubt now he is […]
Revisiting Citizen Ruth
By Lesley Brill. Alexander Payne’s 1996 feature film debut, Citizen Ruth, is generally remembered as an incongruously comic look at the struggle between opponents of legal abortion and its defenders in the United States. That’s a topic of perennial importance in American politics, and it’s especially relevant now with the […]
The White Ribbon
By Kierran Horner. The White Ribbon (2009) is about guilt. It is another film by Michael Haneke about guilt. But it would be reductive to suggest that The White Ribbon was something as simple as a macrocosmic, German Hidden (Caché, 2005); an analysis of the guilt felt by a nation […]
Alain Resnais: Wild Grass (2009)
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 […]