Extras
Prévert for Perverts: A Glossary of Dirty Discourse in Café Flesh
As Stephen Sayadian's cult post-apocalyptic film Café Flesh premieres in a new 4K restoration, Daniel Bird offers a guided tour through some of its most memorable lines.
Daniel Bird
Essays
Whatever Happened to Utopia?
On Charles Fourier, Dušan Makavejev, sex, and communism (pictured: La Quatrième Pomme (1993), © Friends of Walerian Borowczyk) 1973. A filmmaker from Yugoslavia, let’s call him Dušan, is in trouble. He made a film, a personal response to a radical psychoanalyst, which was banned. Dušan compared the people who banned
Essays
The Screen of the Sky
On stargazing and the journey towards screening E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten, Din of Celestial Birds and Polia and Blastema in a planetarium 1. For me, the journey goes back twenty-five years. Early October 1998, at the Institut français, London, where I had organised ‘A Weekend with Andrzej Żuławski’. There
Essays
The Representation Trap
How did we get here? The trap of representation, “in cinema at large and in Hollywood in particular,” Elena Lazic wrote, “is usually understood to mean the way in which increased presence on screens does not necessarily translate into larger creative power or salaries in front of and behind the
Extras
Erasing Shadows
There are more important things than film. Nevertheless, film plays a role in things more important than itself, like nation building. Film plays a part in the process of reforging national and ethnic identities in the post-Soviet borderlands: Central Asia, Transcaucasia, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine. Yet there is a
Essays
Everything Old is New Again, or How We Grew to Stop Hating and Love <i>Possession</i>
With Andrzej Żuławski's film enjoying renewed popularity in 2021, Daniel Bird sets the record straight on the history of the film's way to screens big and small On November 1, 2021 the critic/programmer Forrest Cardamenis tweeted the following: No judgment here, but it’s really
Essays
A Ghost in the Dreamhouse
On the fate of films in former Soviet countries Sometime during the last decade, in the outskirts of Yerevan, Armenia, the imposing David of Sassoun relief dropped off the façade of Armenfilm Studio. A former employee suggested that the fall of this national hero and symbol of liberation was perhaps