Category Archive for: ‘Issue 34 – Untimely Cinema’

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 cinema heritage, rather than immediate humanitarian concerns?  Moreover, it might seem positively distasteful to dwell, as I intend to, on some of the Ba‘ath regime’s laudable contributions to the field …

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 years. As a dramatic film about first nations people living in the city, it challenged the norms of both documentary and narrative filmmaking when it was originally released in 1961. …

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 better. – Jean-Luc Godard (1) 1. What History? Images and sounds, frequently overlaid multiple times and set at odds with each other, flash up and flee from us. Some of …

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 towers for forty-five minutes before returning to the surface of the south tower, and entering into the custody of the police waiting to arrest him. Petit’s suspension, which captivated the …

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 may be invoked: misogynistic, lurid, gratuitous, juvenile, exploitative, the notorious “bad guy”, or the enfant terrible, of Korean cinema. Kim’s films may also be mentioned, such as The Isle (2000), …

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 first saw Hitchcock’s Psycho on television.”[1] D. N. Rodowick, another child of the generation for whom television programming and broadcasting practices played a central role in shaping and transforming film …

“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.” (Alain Badiou)[2] Alain Resnais’ cinema is as entwined with the question of time as are the lovers with each other in the opening scene of his and Marguerite Duras’ 1959 …

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 been in the United States at any time since, perhaps, the last explosion: the direct cinema or cinema verite movement of the early 1960s.”[1] Documentary cinema has seen a revival …

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 recreation of an otherwise visually inaccessible past.  The animated documentary’s plot interweaves historical and personal time in the form of Israeli soldiers remembering, or attempting to remember, their involvement in …

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 scene is that of her daughter Laurel’s wedding, a wedding that stands for both social mobility and happiness in the film (though as the spectator has been a silent and …

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 from another era) are questions that are often posed by, and to, those working in cinema studies today. For well over a decade, film theorists and film historians have evocatively, …