Essays
Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine complicate our understanding of the relationship between pop culture and individuals In a West Village café, Todd Haynes once heard Karen Carpenter’s voice. “One day I was sitting at Café Dante … where they were playing 1970s retro music,
Essays
In Vincente Minnelli's Home from the Hill, tragedy is inherited The greatest melodramas are fatalistic in nature. In a certain sense, traceable from Vidor to Sirk to Nick Ray, they all traffic in inevitability. We know what will happen – or, at least, we are never too surprised when
Essays
Christina Newland looks back on an unusual but salutary edition of the Venice Film Festival There are a lot of ways to survive. In the long collective hibernation of the past 18 months or so, some have sought distraction, some strict routine, some online community; I guess I’ve tried
Essays
The American filmmaker discusses his most ambitious film to date Elena Lazic talks to Keep the Lights On (2012), Love is Strange (2014) and Little Men (2016) director Ira Sachs about his film Frankie (2019), a bold cinematic feat that looks like just another “rich people on an exotic holiday”
Essays
Writing about films of the past should seek to expand our awareness of cinema and its possibilities, not freeze or constrict it The question of how to write about films of the past is of course an extremely loaded one. Even setting aside the issue of changing mores and the
Essays
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
Essays
What really makes cinema 'personal'? It might be easier to celebrate the fact that blockbusters are no longer directed by white men who all look the same, if the companies that could still afford to make them were not soul-crushing corporations essentially using identity politics to legitimise
Essays
On Kier-La Janisse’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, the pleasures of talking head documentaries and the egomaniac viewer One of the most thrilling documentaries of the year comes in unassuming dress and hides in the too often neglected and underestimated corners of genre film festivals. Woodlands Dark and
Essays
What is an Australian cinephile today? In his essay ‘No Flowers for the Cinephile (1987)’, recently re-published in a collection of writings entitled Mysteries of Cinema, Australian film writer Adrian Martin finds himself ruminating on the history of cinephilia in Australia. Read today, the piece provides a gateway into
Essays
On Devil in a Blue Dress and American pop culture's ever-evolving "tragic mulatta" What might Douglas Sirk have made of Rachel Dolezal? This past year has seen nothing short of a large-scale sociocultural reckoning with the act of racial passing. There were the scandals
Essays
The place of life in cinema and of cinema in life is a matter of "relating" This issue of Animus almost didn’t happen, due to “life” getting in the way — and as it turns out, how cinema can fit with or be excluded from other life matters
Extras
El Father Plays Himself is so much more than a making-of documentary. Director Mo Scarpelli charts not so much the making of a film, as she does the making and re-making of a relationship — that between her partner, Jorge Thielen Armand, and his father, Jorge Thielen Hedderich. Son