Main Articles – Page 21

Main Articles

MOURNING AND SECRET INTERIORS IN DONNA MCRAE’S ‘JOHNNY GHOST’

By Catherine Jessica Beed

This film came to me as a welcome surprise, a postpunk psychological drama with delicious elements of horror and a subject aching in itself. Composed around the term “cryptic incorporation”, this film breathes in layers; at the heart of it a woman in crisis, caged in a present intrinsically linked with a traumatic past. Cryptic incorporation here being refused mourning, an incompleteness of the grieving process.

2013.07.19

Film Festival Reports

KINOTAVR FILM FESTIVAL 2013: AN OVERVIEW

By Giuliano Vivaldi

The Kinotavr film festival in Sochi is Russia’s major national showcase of new films and has been going now for one year short of a quarter of a century. What this particular year’s festival had to say about the state of Russian cinema was not as straightforward as first impressions seemed to offer.

2013.06.26

Main Articles

PANORAMA: ALGORITHMS BY IAN MCDONALD

By Giuliano Vivaldi

Shot over a period of three years, Ian McDonald’s film on the world of blind chess forges a genuine breakthrough and offers a new vision for the sports documentary: a genre that all too-often succumbs to some of the most tried and tested formulae.

2013.06.06

desistfilm

INTREPID PALPITATIONS: AN EVENING WITH SAUL LEVINE

By Tristan Teshigahara Pollack

Enter the fearless imagery of Saul Levine: a couple engages in a carnal session of downwards dog, children play, BB King takes a solo, cacophonous jackhammers resound as media broadcasts become enmeshed with home videos of domestic affairs. What exactly are we observing here? Are these reflections from a schizophrenic?

2013.06.05

Main Articles

VIRIDIANA BY LUIS BUÑUEL

By John A. Riley

Buñuel’s capitalisation on the Franco regime’s vanity to return and make a supposedly pious film that ultimately outraged General Franco and the Pope, and went on to win the Palme D’Or, is a legendary fireside tale of postwar European film. But how does Viridiana stand up when viewed today?

2013.03.30

Main Articles

FRANTISEK VLÁCIL IN THREE TIMES

By David Phelps

Vlácil’s moral grappling seems like its own answer throughout his films. Men are beasts, the world is hell, and innocence can only exist as a symbol, dove or child, unplugged from a brutal reality and dwelling apart in celestial conjecture. Convenient for allegory, the point operates as pretext, subtext, and text of Vlácil’s movies.

2013.03.29

Main Articles

POEMS FOR THE CROSS-EYED BY KEN JACOBS (1989/97)

By Ken Jacobs

Seven poems.

2013.03.29

Main Articles

MAYBE. EARLY. RESURFACED. (ABOUT KEN JACOBS’ POEMS)

By Claudia Siefen

Right eye. Left Eye:

Some rhythmic thoughts on some cinematic poems by Ken Jacobs (1989/97).

2013.03.29

Main Articles

INTERVENTION (MEDIATION) FOR THE SOUL: THE FILMS OF LIOR SHAMRIZ

By Mónica Delgado

Describing the universe of Lior Shamriz is a complex task. Unclassifiable in itself, the work of this Israeli-born, Berlin-based filmmaker has a vitality and creativity that has referents in cinema, but also in literature, painting, and overall in the mixtures that this burlesque genre offers. Nothing is serious, nothing is indispensable and nothing is definitive in these stories that travel from Berlin to Tel Aviv, where queer and cosmopolitan paradigms (a saturated, necessary but unavoidable cosmopolitism) come first.

2013.03.29

Main Articles

DAY OF THE BEAST BY ALEX DE LA IGLESIA

By John A. Riley

In Alex de la Iglesia’s second feature, a priest discovers a Biblical code that prophesies Satan’s appearance on Earth. He enlists the help of an LSD-loving heavy metal fan and the presenter of a TV show about the paranormal to prevent this catastrophe, which confusingly involves the priest trying to sell his soul to Satan.

2013.03.29