ESSAYS
September 28, 2010
David Ehrenstein condemns melodramas like Coming Home for perpetuating the illusion that they can affect social change instead of creating real change.
March 22, 2010
It was a pleasant surprise to see Alice doesn’t live here anymore. Is it a feminist film? Can a male filmmaker look at a woman through a female perspective?
October 1, 2010
The transatlantic slave trade was one of the most disruptive acts in history, separating Africans from their backgrounds, traditions, and identities. This has had a significant impact on diaspora films.
July 24, 2011
The world is whole beyond human knowing. -Wendell Berry The Tree of Life, by renowned director Terrence Malick, is years in the making. Its history starts even before Malick’s previous film, The New World, was distributed in 2005. After generating a substantial amount of ink in the media, and hot on the heels of the film’s highly publicized win of […]
March 22, 2010
In Les Carabiniers, Godard is in control, from playing with our scopophilic gaze in the makeshift rape scene or denying us narcissistic satisfaction.
October 1, 2010
In Come Drink With Me, King Hu considers each of the director’s tools, using camera movement differently than editing or the wide-screen space.
March 22, 2010
Argentina has one of the most impressive cinematography in the world. Within that cinema, Fernando E. Solanas is a director of seminal importance. In his essay, Towards a Third cinema, Solanas and his co-writer, Octavio Getino, galvanize the overall revolutionary ideas of the time into the concept of a decolonization cinema, denouncing the weak, liberal arts that have, up until […]
March 22, 2010
One of the most interesting aspects of South-American cinema is its post-colonial perspective. Having lived myself and being raised in a Third-world country, I can identify and relate to the plight of South-American characters, living up to their (displaced) roots while fighting their imposed colonial heritage. I’ve seen firsthand the social stratification that the colonial rule instilled into the indigenous […]
March 26, 2010
In I Don’t Want To Talk About It which precedes her sudden death in 1995, Maria Luisa Bemberg explores the same themes as in her most famous movie, Camila.
September 30, 2010
Central Station is one of the most popular and internationally acclaimed Brazilian films of the 1990s. It heralded a renaissance in Brazilian cinema.
September 28, 2010
This essay will explore the duality of Cronenberg’s works, as a statement on man’s curiosity and an open window to the unknown in Videodrome and eXistenZ.
October 1, 2010
What is independent cinema? Critics and film scholars have wrestled with a definition of independent for most of cinema’s existence.