In Search of Mystery
Bernardo Bertolucci was born (in 1940) into a world - and more specifically, a household - of poetry. “I began writing poetry as soon as I could write, when I…
Falling Women and Fallible Narrators
Several of Max Ophüls’ late films make elaborate use of narrators who, in different ways, tell the story, or at least major parts of it: Lisa (Joan Fontaine) in Letter…
An Abandoned Mine: Notes on Orson Welles’ Radio Work
During his interview sessions with Peter Bogdanovich between 1969 and 1972, director-writer-actor Orson Welles looked back on his work in radio and described the medium as “an abandoned mine”, akin…
Jazz and Cinema: An Interview with Gilles Mouëllic
Translated by Adrian Martin Jean-Baptiste Thoret: Your book title (Jazz et cinéma, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2000) suggests almost an opposition in kind - as if there was jazz on…
The Organology of Dreams and Arche-Cinema
I argued in Le temps du cinema - the third volume of Technics and Time, translated as Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise - that we must refer to…
“I Dips Me Lid”: The Sentimental Bloke’s Hats
Ginger Mick (Gilbert Emery) and Bill (Arthur Tauchert) in Raymond Longford's The Sentimental Bloke. From the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. Introduction Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke, completed in…
Il gatto selvatico
Il gatto selvatico (1) Bernardo Bertolucci’s La via del petrolio (The Oil Road) is a film made for RAI television in 1965. The film was commissioned by the Italian oil…
Fallout On the Beach
This article draws from primary sources at the Eisenhower Presidential Library, the Department of Defense Film Liaison Branch archive at Georgetown University Special Collections, the Stanley Kramer deposit at UCLA…
Not Quite
What is a shot? A first definition might proceed as follows: the shot, whether in still photography or cinema, is a record of what happened and is so essentially; there…
A Modern Kiều: Immigration and the Ethics of Sexuality in John Duigan’s Careless Love
In the closing scene of John Duigan’s Careless Love (Australia 2012), the protagonist Linh is seated alone in a dark, imposing hallway outside a university lecture theatre, waiting to take…
A Trip to the Moon
The truth of our placement, when film works as art, is a continuous sense of drawing nearer to a place we seek, with some last vital task or piece of…
A Musical Neorealism : Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme
If I analyse myself today, I see that I always wanted, primarily, to make a film of research under the form of spectacle. (Jean-Luc Godard) I like to say that…
Hey, Little Girl: Beautiful and the “Sexualisation of Youth”
Hey, little girl, is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone? I got a bad desire (Bruce Springsteen, “I’m on Fire”) And it’s no surprise,…