Category Archive for: ‘Issue 41 – First Release’

The final scene of The Merry Widow (Erich von Stroheim, 1925) sees a coronation take place in the grandiose cathedral of Monteblanco, the Ruritanian kingdom where the film is set. The new monarch is the former Prince Danilo Petrovich (John Gilbert), splendidly robed and wearing an enormous crown; amid the opulence of the holy place, which is lavishly adorned and …

The youth-movement counterculture(s) of the 1960s remain contested terrain for commentators across the ideological spectrum, interpreted and re-interpreted from every conceivable political or socio-cultural perspective. The struggle over the counterculture’s meaning in relation to larger historical contexts, in fact, mirrors its own concerns with representations of itself. One abiding concern of radical movements of the period was that of authenticity …

I ‘Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers’, writes John Berger, ‘but, also, undoing the very meaning of the world and – at its most extreme – abandoning oneself to the unreal which is the absurd’. [1] Berger acknowledges that emigration can be driven as much by hope as desperation, and that ‘to live and …

Sohrab Shahid Saless’ Far From Home (In der Fremde, 1975) opens with a statement declaring that this is not a film about Gastarbeiter (guest workers), but rather about the word ‘Elend’. While the German term Elend literally refers to a state of misery or wretchedness, etymologically the word carries connotations of exile and displacement from home. Indeed, in the Deutsches …

Abstract: This paper puts the Czech New Wave film-maker Jirí Menzel into a philosophical discourse with the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka. Essentially the paper argues that an examination of Menzel’s films offers a criticism of Patočka’s understanding of the role of the dissident sacrifice. The two films explored are the 1966 film Closely Watched Trains (Ostre sledované vlaky), and the …