With our first issue of the year on its way from the printers, here’s a few words of what you can expect in no. 2. It’s a special issue on the relationship between Hollywod and the Nordic cinemas. This is how the guest editors themselves, Pietari Kääpä and Tommy Gustafsson, […]
Visual Representations of Disconnection in Ichikawa Kon’s An Actor’s Revenge
By Daniel Gronsky. An Actor’s Revenge(Yukinojo Henge, 1963) is one of director Ichikawa Kon’s more infrequently remarked upon films. Despite the exceptional quality of the film, An Actor’s Revenge is often passed over in favor of examining Ichikawa’s earlier, more popular works, such as Conflagration (Enjo, 1958), Fires on the […]
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am an oilman’: There Will Be Blood
By Bryan Nixon. I cling to films that strive to reach the cinematic outer limits, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now, and 8 1/2; I dare say that There Will Be Blood is one of those films. It is a film defining corruption and greed that tears apart […]
Bumbling Towards Ecstacy: Man on Wire
By Deirdre Devers. Truth really is stranger than fiction. Our 21st century mediascape is saturated with personal and very public spectacles that are so commonplace as to become low wattage visual fodder. There’s the live coverage of David Blaine’s test of endurance whilst frozen in a block of ice in […]
Real Queer Arabs
March 26, 2011
By Omar Hassan. In the post-Brokeback Mountain era of film-making, cinematic representations of homosexuality no longer conjure up lengthy debate or public controversy. Producers have developed the assumption that the LGBT community (who are generally believed to possess a higher disposable income) are hungry for media to consume. As such, […]
Tribute to Arthouse Actress Maria Schneider
By Moira Sullivan. Maria Schneider plays Jeanne in Last Tango in Paris, a young woman who confronts her sadistic attacker Paul, played by a much older Marlon Brando, and shoots him. Schneider sums it up: “I must say that the murder in the end of the film did me much […]
Interview with Maria Schneider
By Moira Sullivan. This interview with Maria Schneider was made in March 2001, when she was the guest of honor at the Créteil Films de Femmes festival. This year’s festival, the 33rd, held between 25 March – April 3 2011, is dedicated to Maria Schneider. Maria Schneider was the Guest […]
A Bodyguard Turns 50: Yojimbo (Japan, 1961)
By Bryan Nixon. A while back, the Criterion Collection revamped and re-released Akira Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo. One of the most influential films of all time, Yojimbo, which translates as ‘the bodyguard’, features a protagonist who stands firmly as the blueprint for the quintessential cinematic badass. Played brilliantly by Toshiro […]
Romain Goupil and Hands in the Air: Love, Love, Bombs, Love
By Daniel Lindvall. Hands in the Air (Les mains en l’air), written and directed by Romain Goupil, was first shown at Cannes in 2010, but is only now tentatively finding its way onto screens beyond France. Goupil is, I would say, relatively little known outside of his French homeland and […]
A Nation Ripe for Thatcher: Radio On (UK, 1979)
By Tom von Logue Newth. When it appeared in 1979, Radio On seemed to have few precedents in British cinema. An independent black and white feature, artfully photographed, with minimal narrative or plot, and a thematically-integrated soundtrack of electronic krautrock and new wave ‘hits’, it was the first film by […]