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Filming the Ebb Tide

Dwarfed by Hollywood, America’s radical cinema remains under-evaluated. Erika Balsom surveys the restlessly internationalist work of Robert Kramer. Confrontations between subjectivity and history, from Vermont to Vietnam, Utah to Portugal.

Auteur as Outlaw

The counter-cinema of the Algerian-born French director, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, combining a wide range of genres with a commitment to collective work and reflexive elaboration. Images and soundscapes, emanating from the banlieue and maquis, caught with anthropological precision by a filmmaker formed by the world of his subjects.

Reflections On An Exhibition

A co-curator’s tour of the ‘No Master Territories’ show at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, presenting an international array of feminist non-fiction filmmaking practice. Erika Balsom explains the thinking—film-theoretical, gender-political, curatorial-technological—that underlay the scale and scope of the selection.

What’s Your Place?

Study of the ‘social cinema’ of Laurent Cantet, from Tous à la manif and Ressources humaines to his latest film, Arthur Rambo. Emilie Bickerton explores the interests and methodologies that make the French director’s work so distinctive among his proletkino peers.

Germany’s Counter-Cinemas

Is a new dissident cinema emergent in Germany? In defiance of the glut of ‘heritage’ productions and navigating a stultifying state-funding bureaucracy, an inter-generational set of filmmakers working out of the Berlin School tradition interrogates the regional hegemon’s past and present.

Editing Chills

Theorist of Afro-American cultural politics and multimedia practitioner, Arthur Jafa’s recent videos—high-velocity juxtapositions of found footage seen through a distinctively mellow Afropessimist lens—define a new space for black art. Naomi Vogt explores the less-examined formal properties of a unique body of work.

The Roar of the Elephant

What might shed light on an enigmatic film in the absence of the artist? Sensitive reading, via literary underdrawings, of Chinese filmmaker and novelist Hu Bo’s masterwork, An Elephant Sitting Still. J. X. Zhang detects a ‘structure of feeling’ distinct from that of Sixth Generation cinema.

Philippine Noir

Critical-biographical overview of the radical Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, against the backdrops of military rule and cacique democracy. Countering his Anglophone reception as practitioner of ‘slow cinema’, a portrait of an avant-garde populist-experimentalist, testing out a wealth of cinematic genres and national-allegorical forms.

Camera Lucida

Erika Balsom on Annette Michelson, On the Wings of Hypothesis: Collected Writings on Soviet Cinema and On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film. Variant impulses in the writing of a pioneer theorist of avant-garde cinema.

Nihilism for Oligarchs

What is the state of Russian culture today, and what is its standing on the world stage? The multi-media extravaganza of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU—a controversy-courting product of the largesse of Russia’s oligarchic class—provides an instructive case study.

Knight’s Moves

A retrospective on the life and work of pioneering cultural critic, theorist and practitioner Peter Wollen. From Methodist roots to Parisian exile, radical journalism to avant-garde filmmaking, auteurism and semiotics to the landmark Raiding the Icebox.

Tehran’s Universal Studios

A political history of Iranian film, tracing the origin of its plural genres through New Wave minimalism, war documentaries and cosmopolitan montage. In a society often caricatured as closed and backward, censorship and market pressures have unintentionally produced a world-class film culture—but how will it fare under the us sanctions regime?

Hollywood’s New Wave

Emilie Bickerton on Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis, eds, When the Movies Mattered. Brief efflorescence of a radicalized cinema in Hollywood, driven by the political anxieties of the seventies.

Memoirs of an Undutiful Daughter

Emma Fajgenbaum on Chantal Akerman, My Mother Laughs. Part memoir, part chronicle of a troubled-tender relationship, the film-maker’s final book.

Cinema as Disquiet

Portugal’s revolution and colonial legacy refracted through the lives of its subjects in the work of Pedro Costa, one of Europe’s most innovative practitioners of an experimental cinema from below.

A New Proletkino?

Is it possible to detect the contours of a new genre of proletarian cinema operating across the widely contrasted films of Ken Loach, the Dardenne brothers, Robert Guédiguian, Aki Kaurismäki and Pedro Costa? What does this body of work say about contemporary working-class experience and its representations on the silver screen?

An Aphorist of the Cinema

Emma Fajgenbaum on Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph and Bresson on Bresson. The lapidary sayings and injunctions to the self, admiring interviews and guarded replies, of the most auratic and least documented director of post-war French cinema.

Dark Mirrors

Fine-grained reading of the films of Andrei Zvyagintsev, from the abstract allegories of his earlier work to the unsparing portrayals of contemporary Russia in Elena and Leviathan, exemplary of a new social turn in post-Soviet cinema. Reflections of class polarization and fables of power, with Orthodoxy as its prop.

Gherman’s Anti-Aesthetic

Recent films of the Soviet-trained director Aleksei Gherman read as enigmatic late-modern outcrops—or meteorites from an unimaginable future—resistant to the all-pervasive aestheticization processes of consumer capitalism.

Just Remember This

Emilie Bickerton on Inez Hedges, World Cinema and Cultural Memory. Political film from Buñuel to Guzmán and Khleifi, through the lens of ‘memory studies’.

A Bonfire of Art

Emilie Bickerton on Michael Witt, Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian. Landmark reading of the director’s epic audiovisual essay, Histoire(s) du cinéma.

Reserve Armies of the Imagination

Tony Wood on Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen. Dilemmas of representation—aesthetic and political—in the age of the super-abundant image.

A Traveller’s Glance

Object of fierce controversy when first shown, Antonioni’s documentary Chung Kuo—filmed in the PRC during the Cultural Revolution—has since been largely overlooked within his oeuvre. The director of L’avventura as failed Marco Polo, whose patient, humanizing gaze left a record of China’s past that is belatedly being rediscovered.

Rossellini’s History Lessons

Why did the director of Rome Open City and Journey to Italy devote himself to a vast philosophical-historical education project? Michael Cramer explores the conceptual underpinning and aesthetic iconoclasm of Rossellini’s TV epics.

The Three-Headed Horse

Echoes and parallels between the work of Eisenstein, Picasso and Orozco in the late 1930s. The recurring spectres of war, conquest and destruction stalking the world from Moscow to Guadalajara to Guernica, travelling back and forth between film, wall and canvas.

Power in the Frame

Origins and mutations of the PRC’s independent documentary movement. From vanguard to grass roots, and from passive observation of a country in flux to a politicized, activist cinema, turning its lens onto the workings of power.

Ways of Listening in a Visual Medium

Within a mediasphere dominated by telenovelas and spectacularized news, what role for documentary film? Recent examples of a critical, anthropologically inflected cinema from Brazil.

The Citizen Camera

A feminist filmmaker discusses the role of documentaries in China’s civil-rights protests. Activism and the digital image, from village struggles in Guangdong to the courtrooms of Fujian, via the plains of Henan and Sichuan’s earthquake zone.

The Mage of Lake Geneva

Emilie Bickerton on Antoine de Baecque, Godard, biographie. Life and work of Europe’s greatest living visual artist.

Poetics of Vanishing

Cinematic portraits of China’s breakneck social and economic transformation, as seen from street level at its provincial margins. Zhang Xudong on motifs of disappearance, demolition and mobility in the films of Jia Zhangke.

Marx and Montage

The author of Archaeologies of the Future unearths fragments from ‘ideological antiquity’ in Alexander Kluge’s recent film on Capital. Encounters with Eisenstein’s unrealized equivalent, seeking a cinematic transposition of the commodity fetish.

Father-Mother

A screenplay from 1935, previously unpublished in English, by arguably the greatest Soviet writer. Amid far-reaching social transformation, notions of love, family and desire are also recast—with serious consequences for the simultaneously innocent and world-weary protagonists.

On Gaze Theory

The author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema traces the dialectic of the gaze from Hegel to Hitchcock, via Kojève, Lacan, Sartre, Vertov and Kuleshov. Vision and voyeurism, selfhood and spectatorship in psychoanalysis, philosophy and cinema.

Screening Peru

Contradictions of his country’s breakneck urbanization in the cinema of Francisco Lombardi. Film’s rival media—tele-reportage, newspapers, radio, videotaped corruption—brought into play to create new cinematic forms.

Adieu to Cahiers

Life-cycle of Cahiers du cinéma. The trajectory of the pre-eminent film journal, from cine-clubs of Liberated Paris to masterpieces of the New Wave, barricades to the pensée unique, tracked against broader changes in French intellectual culture.

Suspense and . . . Surprise

Media projections of the ‘war on terror’ as manipulations of shock and time, purveyed through a perpetual present of 24-hour coverage and on-line news. Lessons from Hitchcock, Conrad and Benjamin on the poetics of suspense and possibilities for a rehistoricization of the attentat.

Celluloid and Plasma

Tony Wood on Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second. How has the digital era changed the cinematic viewing experience—and the spectator? Freeze-frame fetishism and narrative disruption from Lumière to Kiarostami, via Hitchcock and Rossellini.

Cinema, Dream, Existence

With City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster, Hou Hsiao-Hsien established the landmarks of Taiwan’s New Cinema—distinguished by aesthetic distance and break with political taboo. Chen traces the origins of Hou’s achievement to a mixture of an apprenticeship in commercial film, a unique synthesis of islander and high-modern culture, and impartial sympathy for those caught up in history’s storm.

Necessary Love

Liberation from bourgeois marriage, central radical demand from Sand and Kollontai to Piercy, is subsumed in the age of global capital by calls for same-sex property rights. Wollen’s unmade film treatment celebrates loves unsanctified by church or state—de Beauvoir’s relationships with Sartre and Algren.

The Missing Image

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Serge Daney, La Maison cinéma et le monde, volumes 1 and 2. Uncollected writings of the Nouvelle Vague’s prodigal son, with dispatches home from the analog–digital frontier.

Ruins of the Future

West of the Tracks, Wang Bing’s stupendous documentary on the collapse of heavy industry and the fate of workers in China’s North-East, viewed in comparative perspective by a film-critic compatriot. Memories of the battlegrounds of Manchuria, and echoes of Lukács, Benjamin and Hobsbawm, amid the debris of an epoch and its human fall-out.

Shapeshifter

Formal rigour, social interrogation, poetic intensity: Jean-Luc Godard stands in the premier rank of contemporary artists. In this striking reconceptualization of his work, the movies take their place among sound compositions, TV, texts, videotape and graphic art, as elements of an ongoing multimedia installation.

Tensions in Taiwan

Taiwanese artists, activists and intellectuals organize against the fanning of ethnic differences by DPP Greens and KMT Blues during the island’s 2004 election. Cultural identity and official ‘de-Sinicization’ in a fast-expanding East Asian context.

The Camera Possessed

Extraordinary career of Jean Rouch—surrealist, engineer, anthropologist, cinéaste—synthesizing the gains of Vertov and Flaherty, to take his camera inside the taboo. In Abidjan and Paris, ethnographical films appropriated by their subjects as springboard for the New Wave.

Letter from Buenos Aires

New Wave Argentine cinema—documentaries from the badlands, taxi boys on roller-skates, escrache protests—thriving after the crash of 2001, in the diary of an émigré practitioner.

Planet of the Remakes

From Hollywood retreads to avatars of Dr Mabuse and re-creations of Solaris, the mimetic planet. Dialectic of repetition and historicity in the remake, reviled mainstay of the culture industry—and manifesto for a radical reappropriation of the form.

A Suprematist Cinema?

Tony Wood on Margarita Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film. The reasons why Russia’s greatest avant-garde artist preferred Dziga Vertov to Sergei Eisenstein.

The Ecstatic Spiral

Tony Wood on Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique. From Eisenstein to Deleuze, luminous snapshots of the cinema that would substitute a single regime for historical periods.

On Cultural Markets

The ‘culture industry’ has typically been conceived as a unified, twentieth-century branch of production. Donald Sassoon reveals older, more variegated patterns of development, tracing international relations of cultural dominance from Scott and Verdi to the action movie.

Speed and the Cinema

Jeopardy and menace, flight and pursuit: the highwire and lion’s den as kindred to the cinematic thrill. Peter Wollen reflects on the varied tempos of the avant-garde, from René Clair to Michael Snow; and on the planetary expansion of the culture of speed.