Film
Steve McQueen’s ‘Shame': Real Sex in the City
Katy Karpfinger
We Need To Talk About Kevin
Christopher Smail
Norse Mythology and the B-Movie in ‘Troll Hunter’ (2010)
Christopher Smail
Scandinavian cinema is renowned for maudlin flourishes and gloomy explorations of the human soul – take Ingmar Bergman’s searing miserabalist dramas and family sagas like Persona, The Seventh Seal and Fanny & Alexander….
Stylish Love: Xavier Dolan’s Les Amours Imaginaires
Christopher Smail
A young man in his early twenties is illuminated against a blue backdrop in a medium length shot. Rows of golden curls the colour of the sun adorn his head and gently fall down past the olive skin and elongated nose of this beautiful man-boy….
Non-native: the Cane Toad, Kevin Ladynski & Mark Lewis
Nicola Moir
Everyone in Australia has heard the story. The Australian media have a borderline obsession with it. The story is the presence and spread of the cane toad across the Australian continent. In 1935, the cane toad was introduced from….
Blood of a Poet: spectator as spiritualist
Review: Katy Karpfinger
Berlusconi gets bitten
Gegen die Wand
In search of perfection: Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven
Review: Katy Karpfinger
Capturing the perfect image on film is at the same time a moment’s work and a painstaking task taking much planning and patience. The light has to be just right, the location of the camera has to be carefully selected, the camera precisely set up. This is true of both the still and the moving image and yet I have seen few films in which the photographic quality is so clear as in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Press pause on the DVD player at almost any moment and there you have a perfect image; beautiful, meaningful, perfectly lit…
Emotional Literacy: Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage
Review: Katy Karpfinger
My mother-in-law recently added another to a long list of complaints she has about her son; he reads too much. “It smacks of a desire to escape from reality” she said. We shrugged it off and later laughed about it but she got me thinking. Since my husband and I are both avid consumers of fiction and, when we are not reading, spend our precious sofa time watching many, many films, I began wondering whether perhaps she could be right. Are we filling our lives with stories to avoid living real life? For what one can apply to novels one could also apply to film. But then I thought again and realized that, as usual, she was speaking utter tosh. My thoughts turned to Ingmar Bergman, a man for whom the lines between fiction/fantasy and reality have always been blurred, and whose magnificent TV series Scenes From a Marriage we had recently watched.
