Filming too Close: Naomi Kawase and the Caring Filmic Gesture
1 – We both like the same things. We’re parent and child. Are you filming again? Give it a rest!…
Essays
Crazy In Love: Transgressive Femininities in Anna Biller’s ‘The Love Witch’
Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016) opens with the image of a solitary vintage car driving down an isolated California…
From Star To Director: A Look at Kinuyo Tanaka’s Directorial Debut
Among Western fans of Japanese cinema, Kinuyo Tanaka is easily recognisable as one of the great actors of the mid-20th…
mother! in the name of The Father
“The stories of both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene teeter constantly,” warns Donna Haraway, “on the brink of becoming much…
Radical Banality: On Chantal Akerman, Labour in Cinema, and the Legacy of May ‘68
“The most boring, monotonous films [sic] any director ever made. In this film, they just show the woman doing her…
“But it’s not real”: Rape as Metaphor in Sergei Loznitsa’s ‘A Gentle Creature’
“The only thing worse than rape,” filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa wrote in the press notes for his 2017 film A Gentle…
Reconceiving trans womanhood and sexual pluralism in Rosa von Praunheim’s ‘City of Lost Souls’
A seminal figure in the Queer German Cinema and a key proponent of AIDS activism, Rosa von Praunheim has cemented…
In Praise of Mia Hansen-Løve’s ‘Things to Come’
Does the future look something like the sea? The opening scene of Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (its French title…
The Second Coming: Why Women Filmmakers Struggle To Get Their Second Features Made
The main point of contention in the much-deliberated issue of gender representation across the cinema isn’t the existence of the…
On the Double Nature of Filmed Mice
I’m watching Marketa Lazarova with a friend and we’re halfway through a scene that I consider to be one of…
A Backwards Trajectory through Camille Henrot’s ‘Days are Dogs’
A pulsing flower, a botox injection, a watery baptism: through this collection of images, Camille Henrot’s Saturday (2017) explores the…
How can we ever make a movie about nymphets?
Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film Lolita is in black and white, but we all know the colour of Lolita’s lollipop. It…
Cecelia Condit’s Body of Becoming: Women and the Dark Forest of Dreams
“…because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women, or as Hoffmann…
Jeanne Moreau and Marguerite Duras: on Film, Love, and Female Friendship
Cet amour-là (Josée Dayan, 2001) was not especially well received on either the festival circuit or commercially, but there is…
A Calling of the Ancestors? Jill Soloway’s ‘I Love Dick’
“Unfortunately, most films by women aren’t that good.” This declaration, made just two thirds of the way through the first…
Review: Top of the Lake: China Girl
TW: Rape Top of the Lake was brilliant, but it didn’t always make for easy viewing. Any story in which…
Cinematic Riots: Feminism and Surrealism in Germaine Dulac’s ‘La Coquille et le Clergyman’
Germaine Dulac’s La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman) was arguably the first surrealist film ever made. Admired…
Black soul, white bodies: rethinking the music of ‘Big Little Lies’
TW: Mentions of slavery and domestic abuse In the climactic scene of Big Little Lies’ first season finale, the five…
‘Girls rule, and rule, and rule’: revisiting ICA Biennale of Independent Film and Video 1997, ‘The Raw and The Cooked’, curated by B. Ruby Rich
In 1997, the ICA invited American queer feminist critic, curator and funder B. Ruby Rich to curate the fourth ICA…
Going Gothic: Anticipating Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Beguiled’
In March 2016, Variety reported that Sofia Coppola was set to write and direct a remake of Don Siegel’s 1971…
Continual Discontent: The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène
To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song; you must fashion revolution…