Main Articles – Page 11

Main Articles

MIT ANDEREN MITTELN – BY OTHER MEANS BY HARUN FAROCKI

By Elisa Arca

The retrospective Mit anderen Mitteln – By Other Means by Harun Farocki at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) is part of a series of events organized in Berlin that, four years after the death of the director, cover the different aspects of his work : his installations (in the case of nbk), his complete filmography (in a program at Arsenal Cinema), the influence of his body of work on academic circuits dedicated to image thinking, among many other events, including the release of his unpublished autobiography (as part of a first volume of his writings by Walther König publishing house).

2018.02.05

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PANORAMA: PARTHENON BY FRANK MOSLEY, JYOTI AND JOYMOTI BY MEHDI JAHAN

By José Sarmiento-Hinojosa

Among my first views of 2018, I was given the opportunity to take a glance into two relatively new filmmakers’ work: Frank Mosley’s Parthenon and Mehdi Jahan’s Jyoti and Joymoti. While basically two very different works from two filmmakers of different nationalities (Mosley is American, Jahan from India), there’s a sentiment that I assume is common for these two works, and also common of our times: this sense of tragedy, of impending doom, of isolation; working as a mechanism of memory or pure human alienation. The personal and the political resound strongly in these two short films.

2018.01.15

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TEN REFLECTIONS ON KENNETH BRANAGH’S MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

By Victor Bruno

However, as I pointed in elsewhere, the Branaghian cinema—if such exists—is marked by a gracious prudence that is becoming of a film like Murder. In Cinderella, he dealt with a fairy-tale world, and this world does not exist except in our dreams and in the imaginative people. The fairy-tale world—not unlike the detective world mentioned above—is a make-believe world, a world of correctness and balance and where the slightest injustice will meet its comeuppance in transcendent fashion (that is, the fairy-tale is a world of perfect natural justice).

2018.01.09

Main Articles

PANORAMA: SCAFFOLD BY KAZIK RADWANSKI

By Mónica Delgado

In Scaffold, Kazik Radwanski affirms himself as a filmmaker interested in working with detail the out of field, relating it to a social radiography. Shots of fragments are taken, to give testimony about the situation of migrant workers in a Canadian suburb, where beyond the empathy between the outsiders and the people of the inside, an assembly of a dispositive of close ups of hands and actions is proposed, to avoid faces and gestures.

2017.12.07

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AGNÈS VARDA’S QUEST FOR ‘ULYSSE’: NAMING THE GUILTY THROUGH IMAGES, MEMORIES AND TIME

By Andrea Aramburú

Put yet another way, in Ulysse, Varda sets out on quest to construct a film caption for ‘Ulysse’, and she does so by meditating on her own process of creative production through a recollection of images, represented by the photographic stills; memories, her own and those of her models; and, finally, temporalities, by placing her image within a historical lapse.

2017.11.23

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PANORAMA: ONCE THERE WAS BRASILIA BY ADIRLEY QUEIRÓS

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

To the point: Adirley Queirós is helping reinvent the “Sci-fi” genre with Once There Was Brasilia. This is by no means, however, a statement that gives Queirós film the qualification of a “masterpiece”: some scenes feel overly long, and one gets the sense that an equally powerful work could’ve been made in approximately 70 minutes of duration, against the 100 minutes which drag a little bit too much, even for the most seasoned, slow-cinema cinephile lovers. But there is a significant gesture in the political realm that the Brazilian filmmaker articulates perfectly, in this universe of post-apocalyptic intergalactic time travelers which fail to assassinate president Kubitschek, landing in 2016 Ceilandia.

2017.11.13

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PANORAMA: THIRST STREET BY NATHAN SILVER

By José Sarmiento-Hinojosa

If maybe more contrived and less risky than his previous affairs, Thirst Street is Silver appropriate salute to amour-fou. Burdge is never out of control, or portrayed like a neurotic women; her attitude of naivete and obliviousness is exemplary awkward but also shows an unrestricted frailty. Silver never uses one-dimensional characters and here is no exception: even Bonnard, at his most deceptive, is just an aimless man, discouraged and adrift. The construction of this narrative, along the use of a particular atmospheric use of photography and camera, elevates this tragic comedy to a realm of the almost oneiric, something like a fever dream, or a wild fantasy.

2017.11.11

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PANORAMA: ZAMA, BY LUCRECIA MARTEL

By Mónica Delgado

The frame that illustrates this text, and that is also the first to appear in the film, reveals Zama’s nature in itself, the character on Antonio di Benedetto’s novel, that Lucrecia Martel adopts, transforms to cinema and returns it from its most visceral side, like an entity thrown away into the world and forever stopped in this liminal state, in the edge, the border, the shore.

2017.11.02

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YOU CAN RING THOSE BLOODY BELLS – COUNTRY DANCE AKA BROTHERLY LOVE (1970)

By Claudia Siefen

It was in 1961 when Bristol-born scriptwriter and director John Lee Thompson achieved international fame with The Guns of Navarone, exemplifying his visual style and his use of suspenseful narrative. The film brought him to the attention of Hollywood, as he was nominated for an Academy Award, finally leading Thompson to his first Hollywood production, Cape Fear, which got its release one year later.

2017.10.30

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A RUSSIAN GAZE ON THE SOUTHERN CITYSCAPE: TATIANA DANILIYANTS AND HER CIVIC/URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY APPROACH

By Giuliano Vivaldi

Amongst Russian documentary filmmakers there is arguably only one, Tatyana Daniliyants, who restores a vivid, lucid and healthily bright anthropological glance on the city. Not the city of Moscow (although a very early, and very rarely shown, film of hers ‘U’ did feature that city) but ‘southern cities’.

2017.09.25