‘Based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut’ ‘Disillusioned and beloved, Kurt Vonnegut finally became a man without a country and an American institution. When his books are filmed, the cultural stakes are high. Not many socialist films come out of the Hollywood Hills, and this socialist distrusted this profligate medium. […]
Handsworth Songs Revisited
By Celluloid Liberation Front. “If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.” African proverb The recent urban unrest that shook the already shaky scaffoldings of English society – sugar-coated with viral advertising yet hardly reassuring – recurs at a […]
16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, July 14-17, 2011
By Janine Gericke. My fondness for silent film grows more every year because of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. It is exciting to see these pieces of history projected onto a giant screen, especially one as storied and decadent as the Castro Theatre. This festival is populated by a […]
Senna (2010)
By Daria Kabanova. A man walks into a conference room where a Formula One pre-race meeting is about to begin. The camera loves the man’s face, even though it is tired, conflicted, frustrated. The room is full of people, but the camera is only marginally interested in them: it follows […]
Print, the Legend: Andrew Rossi on Page One – Inside the New York Times
By Matthew Sorrento. In the early 1930s, just after the birth of sound in movies, an older medium was running through the newer one. Newspaper movies, or reporter characters onscreen, regularly appeared to remind viewers that events are only as vital as how they are covered. The great newspaper films […]
The Housemaid (South Korea, 2010)
By Daniel Lindvall. The original version of The Housemaid (1960) is often listed among the two or three best South Korean films of all time by local critics. The film and its director, Kim Ki-young (1922-98), were (re-)discovered internationally a little more than a decade ago. Kim, who started his […]
Wine Before the Massacre
By Rajko Radovic. Before picking up an automatic weapon a man savours a glass or two of a vintage wine. He wants the moment to last. He looks around and sees his surroundings with new eyes. Then comes the police uniform. He masks himself so he can become what he […]
Chris Cunningham Live
By Jamie Isbell. A large black curtain slowly parts and reveals three grey screens. Then a dense and inconsistent ripple of excitement erupts from a shuffling and enthusiastically rowdy crowd flooding the Roundhouse in North London on this evening of June 1st, 2011. It takes a few minutes of chants […]
The Implication of “WOW”
By Gary McMahon. “Films should be made with innocence,” someone said Orson Welles said, and someone else said Charles Laughton knew exactly what Welles meant if indeed he said it when Laughton directed his own first-time masterpiece. Let’s not get hung up on whether and when Welles said it and […]
The Spirit of Journalism: Requiem for News of the World
By Celluloid Liberation Front. ‘Representation is a denial of participation’ (Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi in The Green Book) ‘They can sneer all they like, I’ll keep the 15000 extra copies’ (Keith Rupert Murdoch) Slap the Monster on Page One gave the title to Marco Bellocchio’s film about media manipulation of social […]