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
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 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