Essays
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
Restrictive legislation around film copyrights is stopping a countless amount of titles from doing what they are meant to do: being watched ‘A film that isn’t screened is dead’ — thus spoke Henri Langlois, the famed programmer of the Cinémathèque Française where Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and their contemporaries found
Essays
Artwork by Neven Udovičić The upcoming edition of the Cannes Film Festival is bracing itself for possible interruptions by striking workers this week, who would certainly ensure their voices were heard by making the screens go dark. Simultaneously in the United States, screenwriters are striking to protest unfair working conditions
Extras
Following a shocking decision by the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes regional council, the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (Clermont ISFF) in France has just lost more than half of its 2023 funding from that council, per a press release from the collective Sauve qui peut le court-métrage. The reputation and value of Clermont
Extras
It is tempting when writing about the work of Krzysztof Kieślowski to trade in very big concepts, which ultimately tell us little about the films themselves. A Kieślowski film cannot simply be a love story, it is about love. It isn’t that his films don’t invite this kind
Extras
Grief is more than losing someone who meant a lot to you and seeing a void where they once were; it also involves figuring out what to do with the reminders and remainders of them, the traces they have left behind. It’s an impossible problem: that person is gone,
Essays
On Annie Ernaux’s The Super 8 Years, and a lifetime of stowin’ away the time “Now society had a name, ‘consumer society,’” Annie Ernaux writes in her 2008 opus The Years: Spending was in the air. There was a resolute appropriation of leisure goods […] Television sets were turned in
Essays
When a powerful foreign entity like Netflix reboots an Australian series, who can be said to really shape Australian culture? Early one September morning in Melbourne, I awoke to find my Twitter feed abuzz with tweets about the new hit Netflix series Heartbreak High, itself a reboot of the much-loved
Essays
On watching Patricio Guzmán’s My Imaginary Country in Goa, India The film wasn’t the main thing that day. What really counted then was the warmth of the air and the noise of the traffic on a busy road — a man hurtling past on a Vespa carrying two multi-packs
Essays
E. Elias Merhige’s cult classic makes us look between the frames People who worry about the distinction between the life lived and the life examined need to check out that thing called cinema. Watching a film always involves a degree of push-pull between watching the screen, and being afraid
Essays
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
Artwork by Neven Udovičić Watching films can be uncomfortable when they ask us to leave some of our ego at the door. Not to be confused with our brain, of course, which in fact tends to go into overdrive when our more self-indulgent impulses quiet down. Cinema is often talked