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 […]
The Illusionist: ‘There are no magicians’
By Daniel Lindvall. In 2003 The Triplets of Belleville, with its unlikely, irrepressibly feisty and combative, elderly heroines, took us by storm. Now, French animator and director Sylvain Chomet follows it up with his second feature-length film, The Illusionist (2010). Let me say at once, viewers who expect more of […]
CinemAfrica 1: Viva Riva! and The Last Flight of the Flamingo
By Daniel Lindvall. CinemaAfrica is Stockholm’s annual African film festival. The 12th edition, 23-28 March 2011, screened 43 films from 16 countries, not counting a block of 15 animated short films. The programme included films by directors well known to international art house audiences, such as Chadian Mahamat Saleh Haroun […]
Ten Zan – Ferdinando Baldi’s Ultimate Mission
The story of an Italian/North Korean action movie joint venture. By Johannes Schönherr. “Amerinda Est. Presents … Frank Zagarino and Mark Gregory in … Ten Zan – The Ultimate Mission … written and directed by Ted Kaplan,” read the movie’s opening credits in bold white letters, superimposed over aerial […]
The Heroism of Disobedience and Deceit: Where Is the Friend’s Home?
By Robin Wood. Introduction Kiarostami’s development has been remarkably swift, each stage marked by radical change. Essentially, he has moved from a traditional ‘realist’ narrative cinema, strongly influenced by Italian neo-realism. through various intermediate stages, to an experimental formalism. The shifts are by no means arbitrary: all his work, […]