Hanging Here and Groping There: On Raúl Ruiz’s “The Six Functions of the Shot”
… I’m coming from something to that, and from that going to something. So I always did everything as an arc. I never did this without hanging here and groping…
The Art of Falling Apart: Petulia and the Fate of Richard Lester
Petulia (1968) sits at a crucial juncture in American/British director Richard Lester’s career. Some elements of its filigreed and somewhat hyperactive style relate it clearly to the often kinetic films…
Tending the Wounds of the Nation: Gender in Contemporary Iranian War Cinema
Black screen: indistinct voices: the sound of laboured breathing. Cut to the image of a young man, Ismael (Bahram Radan), his body writhing uncontrollably, overtaken by a sudden violent seizure.…
JLG/Jean Améry
The death of cinema was the subject of intense theoretical concern in the final years of the twentieth century and beyond. The impending approach of the millennium as well as…
Malick’s Music of the Spheres: The Tree of Life
The small but accelerating output of Terrence Malick has largely been approached via its visual poetry. Balancing this, each film has also brought a distinctive soundtrack, in particular the extended…
Ensemble Film, Postmodernity and Moral Mapping
The marked increase in the popularity of the ensemble film in recent decades can be understood to be a product of the form’s potential to present and reflect upon the…
The Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, and the Liberalisation of Film Censorship in Australia
The Federal Minister for Customs and Excise, Don Chipp, introduced the ‘R’ certificate for films in Australia in 1971. As is well known, Chipp’s decision was a key landmark in…