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
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 their
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 Days
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 considering
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 in the
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
Essays
Eyes Wide Shut is New York back lot Pauline Kael’s review of Blade Runner, from 1982, contains a complaint that sounds to me more like a compliment, or even a clue: “We’re always aware of the sets as sets.” The future Los Angeles of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi
Essays
French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung pushes the boundaries of sound and vision to evoke bodily sensations in his breakthrough feature The Scent of Green Papaya Film is a medium that engages with two of the fundamental human senses: sight and sound. And yet in his Camera D’Or-winning debut feature
Essays
The Italian director retraces Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final journey during a spellbinding long take in his breakthrough film Dear Diary Extended sequences perform differently in different films: in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning, a long shot of the main character lying in silence in a dell seems to conjure up
Essays
Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds offers a welcome corrective to the patronising poverty porn of Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland Chloé Zhao’s The Rider, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, stars non-professional actor and real-life rodeo Brady Jandreau in the titular role,
Essays
“She doesn’t just tell us a story, she tells us about a feeling” A conversation with French director Emmanuel Finkiel about his film Memoir of War, adapted from a Marguerite Duras novel, where feelings are as treacherous as words Mélanie Thierry plays a version of Marguerite Duras herself in
Essays
Senses run through this second issue of Animus. Mark Asch writes beautifully about the doubt that so troubles Tom Cruise’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, an anxiety which only the certitude of bodily sensations can quell. James King meanwhile explores The Scent of Green Papaya, a