Syrian Cinema: Out of Time?
Writing in early 2012, while the Syrian army besieges whole towns and racks up a death and injury toll of thousands, is it ill-judged to train focus on this country’s…
The Restoration of The Exiles: The Untimeliness of Archival Cinema
Historical “understanding” is to be grasped, in principle, as the afterlife of that which is understood.(Walter Benjamin)[1] The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961) is a film that virtually disappeared for fifty…
A Skeleton Key to Histoire(s) du cinéma
I think the best way to look at these programs is to enter into the image without a single name or reference in your head. The less you know, the…
Suspended Reading: Man on Wire, 9/11, and the Logic of the High-Wire
On 7 August 1974 at seven a.m. Philippe Petit crossed the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Suspended on his high-wire, Petit balanced in the gap between the…
Kim Ki-duk’s Aporia: The Face and Hospitality (on 3-Iron)
Mention the name Kim Ki-duk, the South Korean auteur, to contemporary cinephiles and one is likely to receive one of two responses.[1] On the one side, a panoply of pejoratives…
Re-staging the Cinema: Psycho, Film Spectatorship and the Redundant New Remake
The press kit issued by Universal for Gus Van Sant’s controversial 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (USA 1960) points out that, “like many film-watchers of his generation, Van Sant…
Parentheses in Time: L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961) as Amorous Event
"Cinema is the art of playing with time.” (Alain Resnais)[1] “If art never ceases intersecting love, it is in the encounter, in the pure event, that it is finally grasped.”…
Cinema Against the Age: Feminism and Contemporary Documentary
In 2006, B. Ruby Rich’s editorial for a special “documentary studies” issue of Cinema Journal observed that the “landscape for documentary production, history, and theory is richer than it has…
Untimely Animations: Waltz with Bashir and the Incorporation of Historical Difference
Waltz with Bashir (Israel 2008) concerns itself with time on a number of formal and thematic levels, from its investigation of history to the use of animation to allow the…
Missed Beats: Unseen Cinema and a Cinema of the Unseen (or Stella Dallas, Again)
In the closing moments of King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937), Stella/Barbara Stanwyck becomes a spectator to a scene predicated on her absence, a scene she has nevertheless made possible. The…
Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time
The question of whether cinema has run out of time, and the related question of whether it is also, therefore, out of ‘its’ time (cinema as ‘heritage’ media, a relic…