Main Articles – Page 21

Main Articles

AUDITION BY TAKASHI MIIKE

By John A. Riley

In The Pursuit of Happiness, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell outlines a blueprint for the comedy of remarriage. In Audition, genre-bending director Takashi Miike unveils his tragedy of remarriage, a radical inversion in which Aoyama, a middle-aged film producer is persuaded to remarry. His desire to find a wife is staged, with the help of another film industry professional, as an audition for a part in a nonexistent film. The film will never materialise but Aoyama’s new bride will. But where Cavell found fables of change and growth in his remarriage movies, Miike fashions his visceral tragedy from myopia, vanity, wealth and status, insecurity, and a long legacy of abuse.

2013.07.19

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RHYTHM: LET THERE BE MUSIC – THIS IS NOT AN ESSAY ON KHAVN DE LA CRUZ

By Claudia Siefen

Familiarity with Khavn De La Cruz’s film work arouses the faint suspicion that he offers his movies just to contain his other creative passions: writing and music. But these thoughts will vanish in just a second. It is interesting how strongly everything is connected in his work, that means, if he composes a score it only fits there and nowhere else. The same with his piano works for stage. Everything has its place and you can imagine Khavn as a wild musician, punching his piano and singing his mind to the heavens. That is the right imagination.

2013.07.19

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

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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

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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