By Daniel Lindvall ‘We think the price is worth it’, answered Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, when asked on 60 Minutes in 1996 whether she could justify half a million children dying as the result of the sanctions regime against Iraq. But despite embracing genocide as […]
‘Planetary Humanism’ Calling: new sightings of ‘black’ bodies in epic films
By Saër Maty Bâ. INTRODUCTION If ‘race’ is dead, the circumstances of its passing must be examined, its funeral organised and – without assumption, endorsement or dismissal – new critical, post-racial processes triggered and affected. Why is ‘post-race’ still an imprecise discourse? Could end-of-‘race’ be a tool for reading (racial) […]
In a Better World: ‘The White Man’s Burden’
By Daniel Lindvall. ‘Take up the White Man’s burden/send forth the best ye breed […] To wait in heavy harness/On fluttered folk and wild/Your new-caught, sullen peoples/Half-devil and half-child.’ (Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, 1899.) ‘Half-devil[s] and half-child[ren]’ – that is a description as good as any of […]
If history runs, cinema can’t keep walking: an interview with Tinto Brass
February 24, 2011
By Amy R. Handler. Since the erotic art-house flick Salon Kitty(1975) and, particularly, the infamous Caligula(1979), starring the renowned Sir Arthur John Gielgud, Peter O’Toole and Helen Mirren, the films of Giovanni ‘Tinto’ Brass are considered controversial by most critics and spectators. However, what many may not realize is that […]
In our next issue: Gangsterism and capitalism
February 24, 2011
Carl Freedman on godfathers and the gangster proletariat Perhaps more than any other major genre of Hollywood cinema, the mob movie has always taken a direct interest in the workings of capitalism. Though the foundational works of the genre produced during the Depression era – Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931), […]
Mr. Arkadin’s New Clothes
By Rajko Radovic. There is a plane flying off the coast of Barcelona. The day is clear. Sun in black and white films always looks like benevolent radiation from some other planet. And in that pleasant yet eerie atmosphere the plane hovers above scattered clouds. It is progressing along its […]
Thunderbirds Are Gone
By Gary McMahon. THUNDERBIRDSwas an international rescue service modelled on the British National Health system in 1966. The philanthropic heroes, in the who was that masked man? tradition, were the Tracy family, saving lives without a thought of profiting. No strings. It was unthinkable in the sixties to have the […]
Call For Papers: Reception Study Society Conference
February 12, 2011
Northwest Missouri State University, in Maryville, MO, about 80 miles from the Kansas City International Airport Thursday through Saturday, Sept. 8-10th (Note new dates) Keynote Speakers: Shirley Samuels, Flora Rose House Professor and Dean, Cornell University “Reading the American Novel, 1780-1850” Daniel Cavicchi, Professor of American Studies Rhode Island School […]
Aurora (Romania, 2010)
By Daniel Lindvall. There’s a sequence in Cristi Puiu’s new film, Aurora, where the main character, the middle-aged Viorel (Puiu), drops his 7-8-year-old daughter off at the neighbours’ place, where she’s supposed to wait for her mum to come home. She doesn’t seem to know these neighbours very well. There’s […]
oN thE eDGe
By Gary McMahon. What has no power, no money, and can bite your fucking head off? Find out by downloading this pdf: oN_thE_eDGe[1]. [This piece was originally published in b/w in Film International 43, vol. 8, no. 1, 2010. Here is the full colour version.] Share