By Robin Wood. This article discusses (ultimately!) two films about the founding of modern Israel: Otto Preminger’s Exodus(Hollywood, 1960), and Gitai’s Kedma(2002). Both titles are also the names of the ships from which the Israelis land in Palestine – legally, in Exodus, illegally (by just four days!) in Kedma. It […]
Revenge is Sweet: The Bitterness of Audition
By Robin Wood. Auditionstands apart from the rest of Miike Takashi’s other films to date: this seems to be the general consensus, and it is confirmed by the three other films by him I have seen. It is the only one of the four that interests – more than interests, […]
Only (Dis)Connect; and Never Relaxez-Vous; or, ‘I Can’t Sleep’
By Robin Wood. Claire Denis: Cinema of Transgression, Part 2 (Read Part 1 here.) What it isn’t I have before me two statements about I Can’t Sleep(J’ai pas sommeil, 1994) by reputable and intelligent critics: 1. On the cover of the video, Georgia Brown (who used to write for The […]
Running Track: 50 Scores from World Cinema
By John Caps. Some seasons ago, Lincoln Center’s Film Comment magazine published an annotated survey of the history of Hollywood film music, “Soundtracks 101.” There I took readers from the beginning of descriptive/narrative soundtrack scoring in 1933’s King Kong through latter day experiments in sight/sound correlation like Waking Life where […]
From Short Story to Film to Autobiography: Bergman’s Intermedial Variations
By Maaret Koskinen. (These are excerpts from In the Beginning Was the Word: Ingmar Bergman and His Early Writings [Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2002], originally published in Film International 1, vol. 1. no. 1, 2003.) One autumn a few years ago the author of this article was in the process […]
Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman’s ‘The Silence’ vs. Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger’
By John Orr. The Silence(Tystnaden) (1962) and The Passenger(1974) are two of the great modernist films of their period, and two of the most enduring. From the standpoint of a new century neither is dated and both are richly rewarded by DVD rewatching. Yet their genesis lies in a previous […]
You Don’t Know What Love Is
By Daniel Garrett. The book Annie Proulx’s short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is amazing: detailed, observant, naturalistic and smart, it is a story about men and land and love and society – in Wyoming, a state of mountains and valleys, greenlands and deserts. Annie Proulx’s language is mostly spare, though a […]
Let’s Kill the Moonlight in Electric Park: a Futuristic Interpretation of Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dear Wendy
By Angela Tumini. Introduction There were times in Europe when the traditions of the past were thrown aside and rejected in favor of the spirit of experimentation, and when manifestos were a recurrent avant-gardist feature expressed in extreme rhetoric, intended for shock value in order to achieve a revolutionary effect. […]
Jake’s Addiction: Dances with Smurfs vs. the Tweedle Dummies and the Proof of Artificial Gods
By Dustin Griffin. In Avatar, it is easier to believe in the marriage and integration of living and non-living and the world that was created a lot more than other contemporary CGI fests like say Alice. This is due to how the creative team structured the visuals and the storyline. […]
Animation Comes to Life: Anthropomorphism & Wall-E
By Nicola Balkind. To read this article, please download the PDF: Animation Comes to Life: Anthropomorphism & Wall-E Nicola Balkind is a freelance film journalist with a BA (Hons) in Film & Media Studies from Stirling University, Scotland.