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An African Brecht

An aesthetic of discrepancy—epic sweep, domestic naturalism, social satire, expressionist set-piece—marks the complex cinema of Ousmane Sembene. Themes of contestation and corruption played out in pre- and post-Independence Senegal.

An Alphabet of Cinema

The author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema and Raiding the Icebox offers a beguiling A–Z of his engagement with films: from Aristotle through Bambi and Godard to The Passenger and the Underground.

The Frustrated Architect: The Cinema of Edward Yang

The Taiwanese New Wave has been described by Fredric Jameson as offering the finest cycle of any national cinema since the French. Leo Chanjen Chen explores the achievement of Edward Yang, one of its two greatest masters.

Taiwan Stories

An interview with the director, in which he recounts his beginnings in the movies, and talks of the economic and political conditions of film production in Taiwan.

A Skein of Reversals

Italian cinema has an heir to its greatest days: Gianni Amelio, whose films—rarely seen abroad—transform legacies from Rossellini and Antonioni, twisting personal and political themes into a distinctive high-tension cord of their own.

Planet Hollywood

The American film industry dominates world markets as never before. What is the geography of its grip on popular imaginations? Franco Moretti draws an international map of action films, comedies, children’s movies, dramas, with some intriguing results.

Time Unfrozen: The Films of Aleksei German

Virtually unknown in the West, Aleksei German is regarded by Russians as their most radical and original film director. Tony Wood considers his techniques of disorientation, and the craft of induced paranoia in his latest movie about the Doctors’ Plot of 1953—its title taken from Beria’s triumphant shout to his chauffeur.

Blue

An elegy for Derek Jarman, meditating on the meanings of the monochrome he took from Yves Klein for his last film, confronting death. From lapis lazuli to ultramarine: shades of paradise from Ficino and Blake to Goethe and Guy Debord.

The Ideology of Play

Taking up John Roberts’s account of the new Danish cinema, Tabish Khair argues that Von Trier’s films share with Benigni’s prize-puller rotations between the playful and the real, stock tropes of the postmodern.

Dogme 95

“With the release of Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), the work of a group of Danish film makers who work collectively and individually under the ‘documentary’ and verité demands of Dogme 95 has now begun to achieve a measure of critical visibility. In fact, with the release . . .” read more

Play It Again, or, Old-Time Cuban Music on the Screen

“A friend of mine, a Cuban film director, writes to me about visiting the Salzburg Festival. After enjoying operas by Berlioz and Mozart, he says, the big surprise was the Festival’s closing event, a concert by the Cuban old-timers La Vieja Trova Santiaguera, chosen by the Festival’s special . . .” read more

Franco and Hollywood, 1939-1956

“The authors wish to thank Devra Weber and Ronald Fraser of their helpful comments and criticisms of an earlier version of this article.” read more

Spielberg’s List

“At the climax of Amistad, Steven Spielberg’s rescue fantasy about the rebellion, recapture, and courtroom liberation of African slaves, the slave leader Cinque (Djimon Hounsou) teaches John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) the value of ancestor worship. He thereby authors the Supreme Court brief that wins back his freedom. . . .” read more

Cinematic Ethnology: Siegfried Kracauer’s 'The White Collar Masses'

“In the Introduction to his last, posthumously published book History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969), Siegfried Kracauer formulates a summa of his intellectual existence. The discovery of the hidden connection between his interest in history and his interest in the photographic media reveals to him the . . .” read more

The Bourgeois Paradigm and Heritage Cinema

“Present disaffection with key institutions of the British state—the monarchy and the Palace of Westminster for instance—has brought about what Tom Nairn described recently as a transitional time, one in which ‘former subjects. . .have unintentionally half-mutated into citizens.’ He added that ‘in a society still unprogrammed for . . .” read more

Nikita Mikhalkov and Burnt by the Sun: A Monarchist Film-Maker Confronts Humane Socialism

“Despite the deep hostility of present-day Russian film-makers to the concept of socialism, a considerable number of films about the Soviet past have been made in Russia during the past decade. For the most part, the directors of these films have sought to outdo one another in depicting . . .” read more

A Note on 'Jumanji'

“Parents have a different experience of cinema going from the childless or ‘child free’: instead of the Art-Deco bar of the local art house, the cavernous spaces of the multiplex and a sense of having been magically transported to the United States as kids in baseball caps and . . .” read more

The Hollywood Left: Aesthetics and Politics

“Two generations after McCarthyism, the Hollywood Left has almost receded from living memory. Its principal figures now show up mainly in the obituary columns of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, their experiences with the blacklist reduced to a sentence or deleted entirely. The most politically . . .” read more

From Courtly Love to 'The Crying Game'

“Why speak about courtly love (amour courtois) today, in the age of permissiveness, when sexual encounter is often nothing more than a ‘quickie’ in some dark corner of an office?The impression that courtly love is something out of date, long superseded by modern manners, is a lure which . . .” read more

The Story of the Lost Reflection

“The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the . . .” read more

The Education of a Film-Maker

“When I was asked to deliver their annual lecture by the Amal Bhattacharji Centre for European Studies, my immediate response was to say no. It was easy for me to do so, since 15 years of saying no to such requests has turned it into a habit. The . . .” read more

On an Aside by Eagleton

“It is always more difficult to criticize a publishing journal than a book or article; even so, Terry Eagleton’s remarks on Screen (nlr 107) are not adequate to the rigour and seriousness of that journal’s project. Essentially, Eagleton reproaches Screen with formalism. More than merely the willingness . . .” read more

Six Films by Douglas Sirk

“‘Film is like a battleground’ Sam Fuller, who once wrote a script for Douglas Sirk, said in a film by Jean-Luc Godard, who, shortly before he made A Bout de Souffle, wrote a rhapsody on Douglas Sirk’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die. But not . . .” read more

Signs and Meaning in the Cinema

“The existential value of the work of art, as a declaration about being, cannot be extracted from the adherent signals alone (its symbolism), nor from the self-signals alone (the medium). The self-signals taken alone prove only existence; adherent signals taken in isolation prove only the presence of meaning . . .” read more

Comment on Rohdie’s 'Signs and Meaning in the Cinema'

“Sam Rohdie’s review of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema makes a number of telling and important criticisms, but I should like to append this comment since it seems to me that on one simple point he has missed the author’s intention, and, more seriously, in certain respects . . .” read more

Cinema--Code and Image

“In recent years a considerable degree of interest has developed in the semiology of the cinema, in the question whether it is possible to dissolve cinema criticism and cinema aesthetics into a special province of the general science of signs. It has become increasingly clear that traditional theories . . .” read more

Roberto Rossellini

“Rossellini’s reputation has ebbed and flowed more perhaps than that of any other leading director. In part this has been because of the nexus between politics and film criticism in Italy, in part because of changes in fashion and taste, in part because of the personal scandals which . . .” read more

Reply to Robin Wood on Godard

“I had intended to write about Godard before reading Robin Wood’s article; the first thing which struck me as I read it was that, though I agree that the issue which he raises is one of the key ones, the words which he uses and stresses are quite . . .” read more

Jean-Luc Godard

“During the English lessons in Bande `Part the teacher asks Odile to quote what T. S. Eliot says about tradition: ‘Everything that is really new is by that fact automatically traditional’. Godard’s films may strike one at first as a bewildering complex of inter-related themes: all the central . . .” read more

Joseph von Sternberg

“Josef Von Sternberg remains best known as the director of a sequence of films with Marlene Dietrich in the thirties, starting with The Blue Angel in Germany and then continuing in Hollywood. Usually these are thought of as ‘glamour’ films, successful because they took people’s minds off the . . .” read more

Alfred Hitchcock

“Hitchcock, of course, is a household name. His first film was made in 1921, his first sound film (Blackmail) in 1929, his first American film (Rebecca) in 1940. He has come to dominate completely the suspense thriller genre; his silhouette on publicity posters is enough to chill spines . . .” read more

Budd Boetticher

“Budd Boetticher is not a well-known director; indeed, even such a knowledgeable critic as Andrew Sarris ranks him among ‘esoterica’. Most critics would be inclined to dismiss him as responsible for no more than a few run-of-the-mill westerns, hardly distinguishable from his equally anonymous fellows—a typical Hollywood technician, . . .” read more

Francois Truffaut

“If Godard is the most difficult, Truffaut is the most elusive of all the directors of the one-time New Wave. As a man and as a director he seems given over to self-contradiction, and his career to date appears to be an intricate web of unresolved paradoxes. He . . .” read more

Louis Malle

“The nouvelle vague is now at least six years old and the time has come to take stock. Perhaps the best way to do this is to consider the work of Louis Malle, never at the heart of the group who took the headlines, yet in a way . . .” read more

John Ford

“The cinema of John Ford is rooted in history. He has steeped himself in those crucial periods of American history which have determined popular American consciousness: the colonization of the west, the waves of immigrants, the three great wars, the depression. Today America has emerged as the most . . .” read more

Alain Resnais

“It is a strange but much noted fact that in the cinema there is rarely any simple correlation between a director’s output and his reputation. John Ford had made some 50 films, mostly two-reelers, before ever making a name for himself: Roger Corman has made over 40 in . . .” read more

Censorship

“Samuel Fuller’s film Shock Corridor—described by Lee Russell in an article on Fuller in New Left Review 23—is not to be shown in England, apparently because it has been refused a certificate by the censor. Decisions like this pass alsolutely unnoticed as a rule—certainly there has been no . . .” read more

Stanley Kubrick

“Stanley Kubrick, by his meteoric rise to the top of the industry, has so far managed to outpace critical appraisal. At first he was greeted as the regenerator of the thriller; suddenly he turned to good causes and social content. And then no sooner had he won new . . .” read more

Jean Renoir

“In 1936, it is often forgotten, Jean Renoir made a propaganda film, La Vie est a nous, for the French Communist Party, starring Maurice Thorez, Jacques Duclos etc; in 1937, he made La Marseillaise for the Trade Union movement (cgt). Then the war and exile in Hollywood. . . .” read more

Howard Hawks

“‘I do not think one can love any film deeply if one does not deeply love the films of Howard Hawks.’ This dogma—to be found in a review of The Big Sky in Cahiers du Cinema 29 (1953)—has rightly infuriated many film-viewers. Their fury, in turn, has provoked . . .” read more

Samuel Fuller

“Samuel Fuller was one year old when Walsh made his first film, three years old when Chaplin made his first, four years old when Griffith made Birth of a Nation, six years old when Ford made his first. Many veterans of the silent film are still alive, working . . .” read more

Introduction to 'Motifs'

“Throughout the world, art and art criticism are perplexingly fluid. It is at this moment that socialist artists and art critics can intervene decisively, staking out the arena for debate, indicating and achieving the next steps forward. In this section of New Left Review we shall publish a . . .” read more

Culture and Cinema

“The Contemporary Cinema: Penelope Houston. Penguin Books.” read more

L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad

“Ideally, criticism of L’Année Dernière à Marienbad should be totally superfluous. One would say: ‘A lot of money has been spent, a troupe of actors and technicians has been engaged, and three châteaux invaded to serve as decor, for an entertainment devised by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and presented in . . .” read more

Film Chronicle

“wilfred fienburgh’s story of a Labour M.P. No Love for Johnnie is a bad novel. The film that the Rank Organisation have made from the book is even worse. Ralph Thomas has directed No Love for Johhnie with absolutely no imagination or feeling (not that one would . . .” read more

Film Chronicle

“arthur seaton, the hero of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (novel) is trying to come to terms with an unsatisfactory world. In this he is like the heroes of Lucky Jim, Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger, and other recent plays and novels. Although Saturday . . .” read more

Film Chronicle

“This is the first of a regular series of columns in NLR on the cinema. Alan Lovell writes: “I am not aiming at a comprehensive coverage of what is happening in the cinema. I intend to write only about films or developments in the cinema which are important . . .” read more

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

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What Comes on Monday?

“after taking a novel through eight drafts in almost as many years it is a great relief to have it published. The first real indication that its spell has been broken is when the six presentation copies arrive. You put them on a shelf and stand back . . .” read more

Come Back Africa

“the second most impressive thing about Come Back Africa is that it was made at all. Lionel Rogosin, its creator, spent a year in South Africa simply getting to know the Africans, and after months of wrangling with suspicious white authorities, got permission to shoot a film, . . .” read more