A Cinema of Satyagraha? A Client-Centered Approach to Film Spectatorship
“In our devotion to realism-as-catharsis, we’ve become so obsessed with psychologizing fictional characters that we forget we are the ones who need humanizing.”
Sanshiro Sugata: Kurosawa’s Elegy for the Reluctant Kamikaze
“Sanshiro is ultimately after spiritual gain — to achieve the purity he found in the moonlit flower.”
The New Lurid: Cinema’s Rape Disavowal Fantasy
“They rapin” everybody out here.” — Antoine Dodson
“It Seems Familiar but I Can’t Quite Remember”: Amnesia and the Dislocation of History and Gender in Random Harvest (1942)
“Whose stories do these films really tell?”
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
History, Herstory, Our Story: The 2010 QDoc International Film Festival in Portland, Oregon
“She had a lot of action inside!”
Perverse Pianists: How They Do It
“Aldridge’s shoot is so striking because it purports to discover glamour in the mind of an unhinged woman: an associative path that has been cut by cinema.”
Black and White Orpheus: An Audio Visual Species
That still finds musicians easier to rob
Things Fall Apart: On The Wild Bunch and Contemporary Westerns
“There remain only intimations of squalor and suffering, of rough beasts stumbling across the landscape without any stability or security in sight.”
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
Paging Groucho! Notes on Morrie Ryskind and HUAC
“Being Marxist in the Groucho rather than Karl sense would have required the Ten to not take themselves or their politics so seriously.”
You Can’t Go Home Again: Mad Men and the American Memory
“In Mad Men, as in modern American politics, the past is a pre-lapsarian paradise to which it is imperative to return, and the fantasy is of those exiled from history itself.”
Interviews · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Back to the Futuristic: An Interview with Bill Warren
In which the author talks about being a lifelong SF movie freak and updating his seminal SF compendium Keep Watching the Skies! for the new millennium
Directors · Interviews · Music & Musicals
Family Remains: An Interview with Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler on Documenting Fishbone in Everyday Sunshine
“Being middle-age rock and rollers, just trying to pay the bills, isn’t an easy lifestyle.”
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
All-American Medea: The Radical Pleasures of Beyond the Forest
“Today’s Rosa Moline would treat her lack of sophistication as a resource and her isolation as a launching pad.”
Love, or Something Close to It: Four Films from the 50th Thessaloniki International Film Festival
“There is always some madness in love; but, there is always some reason in madness.” — Nietzsche
The Sound of Silence: The 2010 San Francisco Silent Film Festival
“Even the most obscure titles drew impressive crowds, and the premiere events boasted sold-out houses.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Pierre Etaix: Revisiting a Forgotten Master
“The man’s a genius!” —Jerry Lewis
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Hitchcock’s Shadow: On Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take
“The doubled Hitchcock mirrors the Hitchcock double, who in turn reflects Hitchcock pretending to play himself.”
Maximum Security: Film Noir, Domesticity, and the Female Captive
“While films about men with dangerous jobs showed them returning home to supportive, contented wives, films that focused on domestic settings showed women caught in oppressive relationships or warped by the narrowness of their emotional lives.”
The Energy of an Era: Revisiting Ken Russell’s The Devils
“How else is one to approach a historical episode involving humpbacked, sexually frustrated nuns; crippled autocrats; hammer-wielding exorcists; doctors armed with holy water enemas?”
What Is Cult Cinema? A Checklist
Will the real cult film please stand up?
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