Spring 2013: Volume 66, Number 3
FEATURES: Global Cinema And Contagion, Film Scholarship And The Cultural Politics Of The Dark Knight Franchise, Pedro Almodóvar’s Los Amantes Pasajeros (I’m So Excited), and more!
FEATURES: Global Cinema And Contagion, Film Scholarship And The Cultural Politics Of The Dark Knight Franchise, Pedro Almodóvar’s Los Amantes Pasajeros (I’m So Excited), and more!
As a tribute to the great French film essayist Chris Marker, Mark SInker and Rob White discuss the director’s epic history of the New Left.
Megan Ratner reviews the new film from Mia Hansen-Løve, Goodbye First Love, a story about adolescent loss and creative awakening with a strong autobiographical component.
Brigitta B. Wagner reports from the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival, reviewing Farewell My Queen, Sister, Jaurès, Revision, Barbara, and Our Homeland.
Voices are heard in Film Socialisme but often the speaker is not seen; conversations are decontextualized to the point of absurdity. The line between epigrammatic and nonsensical is impossible to draw.
“To me he’s a figure at Algiers airport: a man who was thin then, wearing a Che Guevara beret.” Thus the controversial lawyer Jacques Vergès reminisces in Barbet Schroeder’s fine documentary, Terror’s Advocate (2007), speaking of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez — known as Carlos—the Venezuelan terrorist and revolutionary presently imprisoned in Poissy, France, for the 1975 rue Toullier murder of two French intelligence agents in Paris.
At one point in Wild Grass, the protagonist Georges is typing at his desk late at night. As Mark Snow’s wistful music plays, the camera commences a slow tour of the room, encompassing a picture, a lamp, bookshelves, and an African mask on the shadowy wall. When it reaches the heavily draped window, though, we realize that time has been compressed; suddenly it is morning outside
Claire Denis, Militant Politics in Cinema, True Blood.
READ: Fugitive Faces, Catcalling, Debating Inglourious Basterds, and The H-Man vs Liquid Human
It’s four decades now since those pretzel-logic days of possibility, transformation, rage, confusion, and defeat—and increasingly as they’re returned to us, it’s in the form that documentary currently prefers to dab at history: the immense flow of available news footage intercut with middle-aged talking heads placing themselves in careful safe accord with what all speaking take to be the story.
Max Ophuls’s Le Plaisir (1952) has been out of circulation for much too long. It has at last reemerged on DVD, a fine release from Criterion now joining Second Sight’s U.K. edition. Its appearance ends a deprivation and is an occasion of joy.