Happy holidays. Critics, scholars and video essayists are gifting us this season with year-end issues and the sheer volume of it all calls the bullet-point approach. First up, now online from Cinema Scope 61:
- Jay Kuehner talks with Nadav Lapid about The Kindergarten Teacher.
- Phil Coldiron: “Why am I finding it so hard to write about Mary Helena Clark’s films?”
- Adam Nayman talks with Christian Petzold about Phoenix.
- With Li’l Quinquin, Bruno Dumont is “back on solid ground, tilling it rather doggedly at that,” writes Michael Sicinski.
- José Teodoro talks with Peter Strickland about The Duke of Burgundy.
- Jason Anderson: “That [A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence] qualifies as one of the year’s most richly amusing and deftly orchestrated films will be no surprise to [Roy] Andersson’s loyalists.”
- More “Fall Festival Highlights”: Andrew Tracy on Olivier Assayas‘s Clouds of Sils Maria, Sean Rogers on Josh and Benny Safdie’s Heaven Knows What, Jordan Cronk on J.P. Sniadecki‘s The Iron Ministry, Daniel Kasman on Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Hann’s Episode of the Sea and Leo Goldsmith on Eric Baudelaire’s Letters to Max.
- Andréa Picard: “Carlos Amorales, Roberto Bolaño, and Amorality Within the Avant-Garde.”
- Jonathan Rosenbaum‘s “Global Discoveries on DVD.”
- Chuck Stephens on The George Kuchar Reader.
- Currently in theaters: Blake Williams on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, Angelo Muredda on Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure and Adam Nayman on Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook.
“Manny Farber: Systems of Movement” is the theme of the fourth issue of Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema. “Let’s start by talking about Manny in a contemporary context,” proposes Kent Jones, opening a conversation with Jean-Pierre Gorin.
“I’m thinking of the Cahiers interview in the early 80s with Daney and Olivier and Bill Krohn, where he said, ‘I’m not interested in what The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962) meant to Andrew Sarris in 1962, I’m interested in what it means in contemporary terms.’ So let’s pose the same question in relation to Manny’s writing. I don’t want to know how it felt to read it in 1970 when Negative Space was published—what does it mean now? And what is it in relation to the paintings?”
Also in this issue:
- Four pieces by Farber himself: “The Gimp,” originally published in Commentary in 1952; “Ozu’s Films,” Artforum, 1975; “Rainer Werner Fassbinder,” City, 1975; and “Nearer My Agee to Thee,” Cavalier, 1965.
- “Introductions to Manny Farber” by José Luis Guarner, J. Hoberman, Robert Walsh, Robert Polito and Patrice Rollet.
- Articles by Robert Walsh, Albert Serra, Murielle Joudet, Carolina Sourdis and Andrew Dickos.
- And Clara Roquet‘s review—in English—of Coral Cruz’s Imágenes narradas. Cómo hacer visible lo invisible en un guión de cine, a book that “defends the figure of the screenwriter as a filmmaker.”
Since the first round of three essays opened up the fifth issue of LOLA, five more pieces have appeared:
- Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin interview Mike Hoolboom.
- Alison Butler talks with James Benning about Easy Rider (2012).
- Cristina Álvarez López has a video essay (2’48”) on Claire Denis‘s Bastards (2013).
- Sarah Keller on “cinephobia.”
- And Victor Bruno on Eduardo Coutinho and Theodorico, Emperor of the Interior (1978).
Senses of Cinema editor Rolando Caputo bids farewell to Adrian Danks, who’s been associated with the journal longer than anyone on the current editorial team. Issue 73:
- Thomas Voltzenlogel on Harun Farocki; and Toni Hildebrandt attempts to “reconstruct Farocki’s view of Pasolini.”
- Tom Ryan on Magnificent Obsession: Lloyd C. Douglas novel, “published in the immediate wake of the 1929 stock market crash,” and the adaptations by John M. Stahl (1935) and Douglas Sirk (1954).
- Pamela Cohn on a sidebar to this year’s CPH:DOX programmed by Laura Poitras.
- Brian McFarlane on Laurence Olivier‘s first wife, Jill Esmond.
- A note of appreciation from John Flaus regarding last issue’s dossier.
- Nine festival reports, including Darren Hughes on Toronto, Bérénice Reynaud on Vancouver and Zimu Zhang on the 11th China Independent Film Festival.
- Five book reviews, including Marco Grosoli on Jeremi Szaniawski’s The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov.
- The emphasis in this issue’s Cinémathèque Annotations is on Jacques Becker: Tony Williams on Goupi mains rouges (1943), Nicholas Brodie on Édouard et Caroline (1951), John Fidler on Casque d’or (1952), Shaun Scott on Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) and Darragh O’Donoghue on Les Amants de Montparnasse (1958) and Le Trou (1960).
- And Joseph Pomp brings Lee Chang-dong into the Great Directors Database.
Toni D’Angela introduces Issue 22 of La Furia Umana with a restatement of purpose: “We want to promote a different cinema, not because this kind of cinema is ‘marginal.'” Also in English this time around:
- The LFU top ten films of 2014, plus individual lists from the editors and contributors and from programmers.
- Marta Balaga‘s conversation with Philip Kaufman.
- Stefan Ramstedt on Harun Farocki.
As a tribute to film scholar Jim Hillier, who passed away in August, Movie presents two articles by its former member of the editorial board. The first piece, on Eric Rohmer’s My Night with Maud (1969), ran in Movie in 1970 and the second, on Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971) ran in 1990. Also in Issue 5:
- Andrew Klevan on Lubitsch‘s Trouble in Paradise (1932).
- Josh Cluderay on Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and Robert Z. Leonard’s In the Good Old Summertime (1949).
- Katerina Virvidaki on Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998).
- And Julian Hanich on “The Hidden Dimensions of Roy Andersson’s Aesthetics.”
Catherine Grant‘s put together a tremendous “End of December Round Up” pointing us to, among many, many other articles, a few new issues that haven’t yet been mentioned here. “For Issue 7, The Cine-Files turns its focus to the video essay, that lively and advancing form that is increasingly the object of film studies discussion and debate,” writes editor Tracy Cox-Stanton. “Its emergence and development has been thoughtfully chronicled in Catherine Grant’s invaluable blog Film Studies for Free, and its legitimacy as a method of research has been validated not only by a growing number of scholars who practice the form, but also by the founding of [in]Transition, the first peer-reviewed academic journal devoted entirely to the publication and discussion of video essays. [in]Transition has assembled an extensive bibliography of resources that illuminate the past, present, and future of videographic criticism.”
Also via Catherine:
- Drew Morton introduces the latest issue of [in]Transition.
- “MondoPop: Rethinking Genre Beyond Hollywood” is the theme of Frames Cinema Journal, Issue 6.
- And in the new issue of Mediascape, contributors “consider the various ways that adaptation appears as both a formal, narrative, or aesthetic consideration, but also the impact it has on how we approach media as an audience, consumers, and participators.”
In the new Brooklyn Rail, Mark Webber introduces “Towards a Complete Order,” an essay that appears in the new collection Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos, and Joshua Sperling talks with Abderrahmane Sissako about Timbuktu and more.
Recently in Bright Lights Film Journal:
- Lee Weston Sabo: “Radio Raheem Is a Broken Record: Lessons from Do the Right Thing on Its 25th Anniversary.”
- Alan Vanneman: “Looking at Charlie – Monsieur Verdoux: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin.”
- Cecilia de Mille Presley and Mark A. Vieira: “The Wickedest Movie in the World: How Cecil B. DeMille Made The Sign of the Cross.”
- John Tangney: “The Melancholy of Alex Proyas: Seeking Transcendence in an Epicurean Age.”
And finally for now, those who read German will want to get their hands on the new issue of Cargo with its special section on some of the best current television series.
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