Essays
Be Scientific, Douchebag
On the last 30 years of climate change cinema
Essays
Longform writing is the raison d'être of Animus. These free-to-access essays, by writers from around the world, cut through the noise and are guaranteed to be worth your time.
Essays
“It is the word and the image…”
Eduardo Coutinho’s film Man Marked For Death, 20 Years Later is a vivid example of his exploratory, equalitarian talking cinema Cabra Marcado para Morrer, or Man Marked For Death, 20 Years Later (1984), is a film that was made, broken down and remade under tremendous pressure and hostility, but
Essays
On Blue Collar and Dog Eat Dog
Paul Schrader’s bookends to life in Capitalist America Separated by nearly 40 years, Blue Collar (1978) and Dog Eat Dog (2016), two films in Paul Schrader’s ever expanding body of work, have seemingly little in common. While one is a highly acclaimed film representing the best of the
Essays
Stop Laughing, This Is England
This sixty-year-old short film based on pictures and observations by Henri Cartier-Bresson is a scarily accurate and perceptive portrait of England then and now (still: ©La Cinémathèque Française) “What’s at the bottom of being English? Perhaps the answer is: no. A prohibition, an inhibition, far from whole hearted but
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
Use-it-or-lose-it: A Proposal
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
On Film Criticism #15: Struggle
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
Essays
Reelin’ in the Years
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
Streaming Quotas
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
My Imaginary Country
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
Begotten
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
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