“If you can’t bear pain, you don’t live up to your reputation.”
That line, spoken in Chang Cheh and Pao Hsueh-li’s The Boxer from Shantung (1972), speaks to a common sentiment found in the many kung fu films produced in Hong Kong under the Shaw Brothers. For the humble martial artist, the body isn’t only the means by which they perform their craft, or enact violent comeuppance on local goons, it’s a physical manifestation of their reputation in the wider community. Each practitioner is judged on the basis of the shapes they carve with their corporeal form, every chop and kick a signifier of their internal control, every shrugged off injury a mark of their enviable synchronicity between mind and body. In such a social structure, resilience to pain, the most intrusive and instantaneous clarion call from flesh to nerve to brain, becomes a signifier of both inner peace and technical proficiency.
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Cinema, by nature of its visual immediacy, has always been engaged with the tangible anatomy of the human body. In the case of Shaw Brothers films, the strapping physique of an actor is part of the price of entry, each combatant’s clothes inevitably being torn off or discarded during battle, unveiling rippling muscles and chests slick with sweat. Appearances can always be deceiving, of course—an unassuming older man with a hunched back and a walking stick, for example, or a woman whose prowess is doubted by bawdy men at a local bar—though, in these instances still, it’s the stable bridge between mind and body that enables them to overpower their weaker-minded and covetous rivals. But what about when a schism occurs internally, separating the two? What about when the bubbling, stewing viscera within can no longer be contained?
If unity in body and mind is the realm of the kung fu film, then disunity is most often found in horror movies, notably in the transgressive films of the New French Extremity. As defined by critic James Quandt, these turn-of-the-millennium films represented:
“…a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement.”
For Quandt, this protracted description of sputum and spunk was intended to be pejorative, dismissing such an abundance of gore and bodily fluids as merely reactionary, but in doing so he ignored the genre’s many tactile considerations of how the internal informs the external—the contractual sexual exorcisms of Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell (2004) or the deadening disease at the heart of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001). In his book, Brutal Intimacy (2011), Tim Palmer suggests a more suitable nomenclature: cinéma du corps (literally, cinema of the body). Drawing from the Grand Guignol, a popular theatre in the Pigalle district of Paris during the early 20th century, renowned for its gory special effects and subversive social commentary, cinéma du corps brings the body to the fore, highlighting the discomforting aspects that emerge from the mental being coupled to the physical.
In the disruptive disconnect of Marina de Van’s In My Skin (2002), cinéma du corps finds its defining text. Following Parisian marketing professional Esther (de Van herself), In My Skin questions what happens when the subconscious revolts against the quotidian. What starts when Esther severely injures her leg without noticing (her doctor quips, “Are you sure it’s your leg?”) gradually turns into a fascination with self-harm, Esther peeling at the surface layers of her skin in an attempt to find any semblance of the self behind the pores and veins. In contrast with the high-flying acrobatics of the Venom mob or Cheng Pei-pei, Esther has no athletic acumen—indeed her initial injury stems from a clumsy fall over some discarded industrial supplies. Here the body is merely a barrier disguising the true Esther, something to be torn apart and shredded until all that’s left behind is pure. No matter, only mind.
For each of the articles in our new issue, VISCERA, our contributors performed their own autopsies of the body as it exists in the cinematic form. And yet, far from being post-mortems, every dissection reveals the essential liveliness of the human form rendered frame-to-frame, and what such unblinking visions of the body ultimately disclose about each person’s internal machinations.
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It’s November: I attend the excellent Five Flavours Asian film festival in Warsaw. There, I see several films concerned with the moving body. They make immediate impressions: King Hu’s coruscating wuxia movies (Come Drink with Me, 1966; Raining in the Mountain, 1979) gild the fleet-footed martial artist; Mabel Cheung’s slapstick An Autumn’s Tale (1987) celebrates the intrepid duncery of its male lead; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s dissipating Millennium Mambo (2001) etherealises its sylphlike, spellbound heroine. Each of these films feels profoundly attentive to the relationship between embodied movement and physical space. Each shades the connections between bodies and buildings.
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But first, my accommodation. A vinyl leopard wall-print gazes across my room. I’m holed up in the city’s financial district, specifically the 12th floor of an astonishing skyscraper hotel, the NYX, which, according to its own write-up, “oozes a sleek, edgy vibe.” Buildings shouldn’t ooze, I think. From the lobby, the impenetrable lift system proves a monument to white-collar hubris, shuttling me up and down in full sight of the Varso Tower, the tallest building in that brain-melting physical geography, the EU. I watch the people on their computers, partitioned like a grid.
Imagine it: a speck of a man, locked in a glass elevator, rising and plummeting, ascending and decelerating. Imagine him crumpled and pathetic, a creature on display. That’s what the office people see. They are laughing.
The snow is handsome as it tumbles past us, falling faintly and faintly falling, like the descent of its last end, upon all the central European bankers and their trusted corporate friends. Looking out from building to building, I am struck by the idea of a huge balloon that might catch in the ravine beneath the towers. I recall Donald Barthelme’s The Balloon (1968), whose narrator reveals that a floating object, stretching across Manhattan over the story’s run, is in fact “a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure […] awaiting some other time of unhappiness” to be inflated again. I envision the bulge that might appear if the balloon were to squeeze itself between the Varso and the NYX.
Two cinemas elsewhere in the capital host the festival programme: the Kinoteka, a mixture of screens housed at the bottom of the gargantuan, art-deco Palace of Culture and Science; and Kino Muranów, a gorgeous, pickled independent near to the old town. The latter encourages you to hang up coats and jackets in the wings of the theatre, a pleasingly functional and communal activity that has me checking my bare pockets with intermittent alarm. Seated and uncertain, I watch as many films by King Hu as I can.
What’s so striking about King Hu’s work is how it privileges evasion and deflection over contact and combat. In Come Drink with Me, the heroes rely on misdirection to hide and then assert their physical prowess. Strength lies in innocuous appearances: Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-pei), the government officer tasked with hunting down a gang of bandits, is slight and diminutive, shrouded in a wide-brimmed hat; her accomplice, Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua), the slovenly beggar followed by a merry band of whistling children, is a kung fu master whose revelatory skill leads to a gory showdown with the crew’s evil leader.
It’s important to note the buildings in and around which the action takes place. Golden Swallow demonstrates superior trickery inside the airless drinking tavern, surrounded and spotlighted by her smirking adversaries, all of whom are inevitably mocked and confounded by her indifferent dodges and weaves, a noticeably nonviolent succession of precise movements that amount to a kind of dance. Later, outside in the hallowed courtyard of the temple, our hero slices through what appears to be a regenerating horde, almost (but not quite) defeating the venal cast of crooks that engulf her. These varying fortunes are dictated by the differences between spaces and the people who occupy them: the tavern provides a coherent layout for resisting the boozy gathering; the courtyard yields a plein-air uncertainty from which waves of attackers can endlessly respawn.
Hu’s treatment of ensemble movement in both the tavern and the temple is established through medium shots that cut fast to instances of comedic and dramatic expression. At the tavern, the antagonists’ weapons are caught in the beams of the ceiling; in the next image, we’re shown Golden Swallow’s unfurled fan as it collects detritus from the falling projectiles. Inside the temple, we see in close-up her wheeling arms make an expansive pose; in the subsequent shot, a cadre of fighters are sent flying from the altar. In each case, the careful cutting between action and reaction sustains a kinetic relationship between our hero, her enemies and their environs. Hu deploys different situations to alter the viewer’s expectations of people and setting: murderous brawls are reserved for holy arenas and among those who plead in pieties. As Jade-Faced Tiger (Chan Hung-lit), whose lurid white-face typifies pure malevolence, remarks: “I don’t think you should spill blood in a place like this.”
I stick around for Hu’s Raining in the Mountain, where the connections between corporeal motion and constructed space are even more pronounced. As the critic David Bordwell notes, in this film, combat forays have been replaced with “zigzag chases, evasions, and hide-and-seek manoeuvres.” Hu reuses the sacred temple locale, pairing his ironic detachment towards its inhabitants with an intimate sense of its configurations, as competing factions try to steal a priceless scroll amid the jostling of monasterial politics. We mock wryly the monastic contingent and their superficial adherence to spiritual matters, as the air of subterfuge inspires both the movement of the characters and their manipulation of the real-world environment, the eighth-century Bulguksa Buddhist site in which the film was shot.
Whereas Come Drink with Me offers a revenge tale spanning multiple locations, Raining in the Mountain is strictly situated within the byzantine layout and complex construction of the abbot’s retreat. On this point, Bordwell writes perceptively that “the geography of the monastery gave [Hu] vast opportunities for booby-trapped compositions. Figures and faces pop in and out of doorways, corridors, and windows.” These visual possibilities are widely afforded to the viewer, who sees everything: monks appearing from behind walls, assassins backflipping over ledges, spies tip-tapping across porches, and intended victims standing alone, prey to others, idling in passages and along walkways. The self-contained area accentuates every small gesture; our eye is drawn less to how characters intervene in the space and more to how they exist within it.
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Extracted from my Hu enclave, I catch other retrospectives. The sprightly yearning of An Autumn’s Tale is carried by its leads: Chow Yun-fat’s jack-in-a-box gait provides the clowning counterpoint to Cherie Chung’s doe-eyed composure. Both play immigrant Hongkongers in New York’s Lower East Side, living in tiered, tumbledown apartments, a background for the pair’s unconsummated affection. Shooting on location, director Mabel Cheung fashions scenes of minor textures framed by major landmarks: the most striking of which has Chow’s hero-schlub, after a failed romantic chase, strolling forlornly down a slip road from Brooklyn Bridge, as a droll procession of taxi cabs hurtle around behind him. Thwarted desire is undercut by concrete matters: the incline of the highway, the flow of traffic, the sad slump of the human form.
This comic scene is brought into relief by the opening sequence of the Taipei-set Millennium Mambo, where the overpass supplies an earnest and exultant demonstration of transient longing. Incandescent, cylindrical lights fixed overhead denote the path the camera follows, dipping behind Vicky (Shu Qi) as she bounces, stretches, and waves to the end of the crossing. Hou Hsiao-hsien tracks his protagonist in slow motion, stylising her movements, glorifying her fluidity, funneling her person (literally) into the narrative.
Mambo is not a clear-cut story of cause and effect, drama and plot. As Esmé Holden suggests, the film presents a string of memories that begin to “lose their precision and chronology.” Through abrupt temporal leaps, we find Vicky’s life at disconnected points and places, a montage of estranged moments captured in slow pans and long takes. Foreshadowing the love affairs that deteriorate inside this woozy, urban maelstrom, Hou first portrays Vicky’s vaulting presence over the footbridge as a diaphanous rumour, as a set of possibilities, as a single limitless threat.
For all this rumination on movies of yesteryear, the tensions between body and building are most suggestively pursued in Lee Jeong-hong’s A Wild Roomer (2022), which wins the festival’s Grand Prix. A slippery portrait of two awkward, atomised South Korean men in premature middle-age, the film navigates wealth, mediocrity, and pallid aspiration, to produce an atonal and seductive mystery. It depicts a desultory carpenter tangled up in the life and house of his landlord, and the pair’s proximity is predicated on both their physical intimacy and their psychological dependence. The goateed tenant, another hero-schlub of distinction, is at the mercy of his slicker (but no less pathetic) proprietor, who solicits him for day-drinking and general hanging out, all the while chipping at the porous barrier that divides owned and rented space.
Which is to say, they can neither escape nor resist each other. The film’s main joke, after all, is about “separation and connection”, the vapid ethos for the home architecture that both men inhabit. This mantra of interior design suggests an insidious social politics: there is no such thing as private experience, scrutiny is guaranteed, and life, in essence, is one long concession to perpetual spectatorship. You should be able to see one another, always. I reflect that my yo-yo impression between the high-rises, while mostly an oscillating exhibition of human folly, illustrates an eternal sentiment: observation is a virtue, and we must not look away. The sum of which transports the affective relationship of body and building into the startling present: what does modern home ownership say about us? And more to the point, what do those tall things in the sky tell us about our feelings?
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Titillation is in peril. The art of rousing emotion through seductive imagery, chasing new forms of stimulation through subtlety, is often now being closely guarded by the social media ‘mod(eration) squad’, a faceless embodiment of the sex-negative internet crowd. A crowd of the terminally online, petrified at the thought of navigating the grey mores of a sexual encounter. Not just within their own lives but also the mental implications of confronting ambiguity that leaves them squirming. Being naked, truly naked, has been stolen from us by a sexless age, one afraid of nudity that doesn’t conform to its transparent agenda. Welcome to the new vanity of digital reflections, a vanity measured in detail over time, filter and airbrush, a vanity that’s malleable but increasingly further from a true form.
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This is why the nudity found in experimental film, which exists to test the limits of creative possibility, still feels so fresh and inviting, a minor thrill in a world of anodyne perfection. Contemporary desire so tamed by a straightlaced vanity and moralism is thrown into a visceral world. Instead of human sculptures cut from marble, we’re presented with shapeless clay. ______
Take the unadorned nudes of R Bruce Elder’s Sweet Love Remembered (1980). Elder is a criminally underrated Canadian academic and experimenteer, who deals in grandiose opuses that speak in advanced cinematic languages, which often feel incomprehensible but are also an almost idiosyncratic codex to exploring his connections to queer love and identity. Sweet Love Remembered was a response to two quotes he heard by Nietzsche, “Eros nowhere makes its intentions more clear than in the desire to make two things one.” And another by Freud, “what must these people have suffered to have become this beautiful?”
From the start of the short, we’re not immediately pushed into how we should feel; no sex is actually occurring; we only witness the small touches. We’re not even aware that it’s two women who are being depicted until halfway through the short. But through its visual flourishes, we’re progressively drawn deeper into exploring past love psychically through the emotion of touch. Eschewing the usual softcore colours of heavy red or purple neon, the nudity is lit through natural sunlight coming through blinds, giving a sense of realism and intimacy but also nostalgia on the glowing skin. With the sunlight constantly moving and waning, a sense of unease builds that memory is fading with the light.
The computer music we hear throughout (composed by Elder himself) reinforces the alienness of the touch, not cold but ethereal. By avoiding the convention of nostalgia pop and fast cuts, we are able to focus on bodies like our own that seem unknown but are still open to contact. The uniqueness of the nudity comes through Elder’s sense of pace; he never lingers for too long, as the memory remembers the touch but not the other person’s reaction to it. The contrasting elements of the glacial music become disorientating with double exposures, the recollection weighing heavily as it comes to climax. Elder’s absence of a traditional narrative structure allows for a deeper sense of personal reverie, lost in the nostalgia.
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Another take on truth in nudity is Pipilotti Rist’s Pickelporno (1992), a short paralleling the stages of female orgasm, centred on a couple’s exploration of each other’s bodies. Her work has been mostly made with a gallery setting in mind, allowing the Swiss artist a higher sense of free expression and the ability to delve deeper into more singular and personal themes like escapism and personal satisfaction. Rist often places her own nude body into the works, such as her first film I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986) where her dress is exposed while the titular Beatles line loops in the background.
Rist’s work has been a study in cultivating an intensely colourful visual world to process internal struggles and desires. Building on Elder’s sense of metaphorical nudity, Rist hones in on the instant feeling of touch, rolling through the body by the use of the roving eye of the camera. Whereas Elder was stuck in reverie, Rist is more concerned with the intangible instant.
Throughout, we hear the sound of birdsong and upright bass, heightening the innate sensuality of the natural touch. This is then undercut with more jagged synths, chanting and breath. The use of breath over surrealistic imagery within the world of the orgasm is important as it establishes aural momentum and builds a deeper connection to the cause and effect of each moment of pleasure.
Lit plainly at first, the nudity is augmented through a superimposed green screen effect. Nourished by a kaleidoscope of imaginative images. The visuals are playful, with superimposed flowers and lava elevating the euphoria. The sensual joy is made visceral by using imagery with immediate recognition. Our understanding of it is instinctual, speaking faster than words. Rist constantly rolls around these visuals, not satisfied with cutting between the couple, she superimposes coloured shapes over hands and feet, layering the images to dazzling effect.
Put simply, Pickelporno is visual foreplay, focussed on the body parts usually left outside the sexual spotlight. We still see lips, tongues and genitals, but there’s also the tips of fingers and the folds of an elbow playfully caressed. Rist goes beyond Laura Mulvey’s ‘Renaissance’ mindset regarding the fragmented body, harnessing the power of film to go beyond how the eye processes information for a more granular experience that titillates the senses.
Shooting sex can be a hostile act. As screening it is, in effect, sex being visually forced upon the viewer. It’s jarring being confronted with someone else’s desires. In a world tailored to personal satisfaction, it can incur emotional paralysis when held in gaze for too long. Pickelporno eschews this by transforming the participant’s conventional eye-to-eye into an omniscient spectator, rolling around gleefully from man to woman until they merge visually.
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Experimental cinema is a safe haven for these depictions of sex; free from judgement, the body is allowed to simply be. Perhaps this is because most experimental film exists within a cultural safety net, whilst mainstream cinema walks the tightrope of commerce. This attracts directors and audiences willing to explore ideas more than ideals, intrigued by personal visions of vulnerability that would be pulverised by an audience demanding palliative entertainment to endure the death spiral of life. Looking at the two films discussed, Elder has spent much of his life in academia and Rist is an art gallery darling; these sorts of institutes, while not perfect, do allow for a greater outlet of personal creative introspection than conventional theatrical screenings.
We often see nudity in modern media but not real nakedness, not real emotions escaping the body. The author RS Benedict talked of bodies becoming investments and that they ceased to be “the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure”. Delving further, it’s crucial to ask “in pursuit of aesthetic standards,what do we give back to ourselves?”
Without a space to mirror simple pleasures, we become islands within ourselves, constrained and dulled. Real nakedness is being able to express pleasure freely and can be found in the captured intimacies of diary filmmaking or the raw, unrestrained performances actors can unleash when freed from expectation.
This experimental creativity is found in the visceral, the physical, the nude. Giving us an honesty honed through expression without artifice. Nudity is the freedom to be ourselves, alone but also with others. Through memory and sensation, we exercise this freedom.
For without it, we are basically dead.
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‘She clogged the mother toilet when she was slayed.’
Mr Kuleshov is a very powerful man, whose effect on audiences is unparalleled. His suggestion that the camera can create a psychological association by cutting from an object to a character’s reaction, is the foundation for much of the cinematic form. He should be carved into Mt. Rushmore. But he never met a character like Lise. In Identikit, the 1974 adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novella The Driver’s Seat (1970), Elizabeth Taylor plays a character who defies reaction. On the search through Italy for a man who’s ‘just her type’ (that is, someone to kill her), her behaviours defy reasoned response, putting the viewer in an alienated space where questions of female and narrative agency go hand in hand. With the modern reaction video format eroding the line between visceral reactions and performative bluster, something about this film, which is often met with bemusement and claims of the maudit, seems keyed into the way that contemporary visual art is received.
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The reaction shot is a key element of film grammar, which variably instructs or suggests to viewers how to think or feel about a given character’s behaviours through the responses of others. Spark is a writer whose clipped, authoritative, narrative voice behaves as its own Kuleshov effect, a constant back and forth of action and reaction. Hers is an inherently 20th century voice through its embrace of cinematic technique. So visual as to be ambiguous, as this first description of Lise shows, ‘Her lips are slightly parted; she, whose lips are usually pressed together with the daily disapproval of the accountants’ office where she has worked continually, except for months of illness, since she was eighteen.’ Spark takes us from the present of the parted lips to the continuous past of office drudgery, to these initial references to illness. Spark’s technique has been called the ‘voice of God’, the sound/image mix of her prose presenting a single tableau over time, like Bazin’s melting vision of cinema.
Following the Cleopatra (1963) debacle, Elizabeth Taylor had searched for herself. Escaping bloated budgets and outsized financial expectations (if not tabloid interest), she embarked on a decade-plus cycle of projects for the kind of directors Andrew Sarris would categorise as short of the pantheon, the likes of Joseph ‘Far Side of Paradise’ Losey (Secret Ceremony, 1968), and John ‘Less Than Meets The Eye’ Huston (Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1967). Many of these co-starred her then-husband Richard Burton, who dragged her to Europe and the self-consciously arty film industry that came with it. Mere days after their first divorce, Taylor would begin filming Identikit for that Italian purveyor of esoteric transgression, Guiseppe Patroni Griffi, whose crude sex-Dramas such as Love Circle (1969) were filled with sensory splashes of colour and body that waft off the screen like bad perfume.Though it’s seen as a curio in Taylor’s filmography, It is the project that most fully grants her and her audience total exegesis of the star persona.
Taylor is twitchy, as though a poise applied offscreen, and taken for granted by the viewer, is due to crack whenever the camera is trained upon her. In Identikit, she takes this to a maximum expression of her persona by attempting a staging of extremis: the look is more extraordinary than ever, but the body is blank. ‘I haven’t broken down like that for years’ she says on the phone, as she excuses her sudden absconding from daily life.
This figure functions as a cinematic expression of Spark’s prose because it asks the viewer, how do we read this? This is not the beautiful-made-ugly misogy-horror of Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1964), something haunted through age. Instead, Lise is presented as too much. Too much beauty, too much makeup, too much costume, too big hair. ‘Off to join the circus?’ Her landlady laughs, gesturing at the carnivalesque spectre before her. Then there are the lurid pulp books she loudly chooses for a stranger. These reactions to Lise range from disgust to disregard to the fascination shown by an English Lord (Andy Warhol). Warhol is arguably the original reaction video maker whose screen tests provide an unblinking, surveillance cam-like dedication to their subject. He had printed Taylor numerous times in the Cleopatra period, perhaps most famously in 1964 as ‘Liz’. His bored presence adds one of several meta-textual flourishes that begs the audience to react to Lise not as a character but as a figural apparition of Taylor herself. ‘How do you know he’s not my type?’ Lise repeats to many people she meets, as if the only thing worse than to be perceived, is to have that perception mediated through an aesthetic matchmaking with any of the leering men that she meets.
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In Dr Cute (2019), a 5 minute film made as part of her Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery exhibition Too Cute, Rachel Maclean explores the cuteness industrial complex. Taking a Sparkian approach to revolution against the film’s gaze, it has the form of a recorded lecture by an ‘off-brand Care Bear Professor of Sweet and Sinister Studies’ (Maclean, in a costume that’s better seen than described). As with all her work, the setting is some potentially online realm, a CGI-pink back projected space dotted with floating hearts, bow ties, and other darling signifiers. This cute aggression — a psychological compulsion to squeeze, crush, and kill — is the engine of Cinema, stroking our eyeballs with soft production design, with a catchy score, with Elizabeth Taylor. Dr Cute’s climax mirrors Identikit, as the Doc makes an effort to escape the confines of the frame, ‘Adults are becoming children while children are becoming adults. It’s a cuteness invasion!’
Indeed, cute is the main currency that drives viewing spans in the attention economy. Reaction videos are a key example of this. In their sanding down of everyday existence, the form provides an adornment, an ironic distance through which to experience narrative. The reaction video is often truncated. You can participate in Saltburn (2023) in just 10 minutes, with a drooling zoomer cracking zingers at the cum-guzzling or period fingering. This is presumably an easier way to watch and understand Emerald Fennell’s version of transgressive cinema than to sit through its full 127 minutes. But it isn’t a true, real-time rendering of the experience. Reaction videos are also often false. Titles like ‘College Students hear Steely Dan for the first time’, ‘Seniors try Elfbar’, or ‘British people react to Moneyball’ are plentiful, usually accompanied by a thumbnail image of the Band/Film/disposable vape in question, beside an outrageously OTT headshot of the reactor with their brows raised and mouth formed in a giant O (commonly referred to as ‘soyface’). Often it is clear that the participant has seen the subject in question before, and is performing a version of their initial reaction. They might play it up for the camera, but they can also play it down. Anthony Paul D’Aliesio and Luca Guerini, hosts of the NFR Podcast were roundly mocked on Reddit, Twitter, and their own comment sections for their reaction to Travis Scott’s album Utopia (2023). Their exaggerated head banging, gurning excitement at some commercial trap seen as goofily playing up to the camera. This was clearly taken on board when they reacted to a Playboi Carti track some weeks later: the nods were visibly more subdued, the facial expressions more composed and thoughtful than the sheer exuberant (if corny) pleasure of their earlier video. The demands of the genre’s desperate beg for attention shows participants whose very bodies are held down by the camera’s glare.
Decades earlier, Griffi’s mise-en-scene in Identikit accentuates this problem at each turn. When Lise buys her outfit, the empty store is dotted with mannequin faces covered by foil, like Magritte’s lovers. The camera tracks past Lise’s breasts imprisoned in a bra, revealed with gossip rag titillation and squashed by the camera movement’s reaction to its own luridness. And then admired again, because it can’t help itself. Griffi gleefully leans into Spark’s ironically dehumanising gaze. Taylor the star and Lise the character fight back against this approach, the former through her shrieking anti-sexuality, and the latter by her essential search for someone to kill her and break the control of the narrator/filmmaker.
‘I can’t stand being touched!’ Lise screams when checked over at airport security, moments before claiming her handbag is a bomb. This encroachment of a real political conflict into her reality, specifically a suggestively bubbling undercurrent of Middle Eastern conflict, is often accompanied by Lise’s most vicious outbursts. In one of the film’s wildest scenes, her stroll beside the River Tiber is interrupted when someone flings a grenade into a passing car carrying an unidentified Sheik. She runs — seemingly in escape, but — Kuleshov again! — the camera pans right to left as though towards the inferno. The next thing we know, she is writhing on the ground, arm outstretched towards the flames. Screaming, crying, throwing up. Then an Italian man swoops in to rescue her. Foiled again, by narrative justice.
The Driver’s Seat makes a spiritual and literal appearance in Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect too Much From The End of the World (2023). Facing us towards the driver’s seat in the Iranian style, Jude’s film is something of an extended reaction shot wherein the viewer is exposed to the daily indignities of late capitalism in Romania, in this case, through the dangerously long hours mandated by the film industry, in something like real time. Of course, Angela’s (Ilinca Manolache) 18+ hour shift isn’t depicted in totality, but through extended sequences on the job (Dazid Eastman’s The Plains (2022) attempts the same in a more single-minded fashion, by never giving the viewer the trick catharsis of the reverse shot). In one scene, Angela picks up a copy of Spark’s novel and pledges to read it. But when will she find the time?
I find that patronising reactions to festival films from oppressed countries or former dictatorships share these same tendencies. Jude might receive plaudits from trade publications, or win the Golden Bear at Berlinale, who in the last weeks threatened legal action against staff for posting content that criticized the festival’s alignment with German government support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. All in a day’s work. Radu Jude’s comedy resists pity, but our reaction creates the ironic distance which in turn forces the refined Western cinephile audience reaction to create the Verfremdungseffekt. In Identikit, the unidentified Middle Eastern conflict that plays out in the film’s background raises similar notions of representation, both cinematic and transnational.
Do Not Expect too Much From The End of the World’s outbursts take the form of Bobitza, an Andrew Tate parody that Angela uses as a funnel for the ambient hatred and crushing social violence that is enacted around her, from harassment, to undermining, to the part she inadvertently plays in covering up corporate malfeasance. Bobitza is a scream into the void. Does Lise even have a void? With each juddering convulsion, each outburst, and as she inevitably, painfully, finds her type in a deranged murderer who releases her from life in the exact way she demands, it becomes clearer to the audience that this is a whodunnit where the answer is the narrator.
Angela suggests that the YouTubers can find their own Spark moment and fight against their narrator. Jude’s bravura filmmaking presents us with one potential, by spinning our reality into an unflinching fantasia of modernity that exposes in painful detail the exploitative structure of the film industry. In our current reality, in which interactions are mediated by cameras and we are our own content creators, Identikit is a warning shot. For it ends with Lise not just martyred for her agency, but her body defiled, Griffi having the last laugh as the ultimate author of her destiny. You never know how someone will react to you, after all.
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In November 2023, the legendary Benidorm sex performer Sticky Vicky passed away. Known for her ability to produce a wild plethora of objects from her pussy, Sticky Vicky’s career emerged from the post-Francoist liberalisation of sexual entertainment. Concurrently, the Catalan film director Bigas Luna was putting together an unofficial trilogy of films brimming with tits that taste like ham and looming Benidorm buildings shaped like cocks. The trilogy is what’s come to be known as Luna’s ‘Iberian Trilogy’, commencing with Jamón Jamón (1992) which introduced Penélope Cruz to the world, then Huevos de oro (1993), and finishing with the lesser known La teta y la luna (The Tit and the Moon, 1994). His work in both Jamón jamón and La teta as it relates to sex, food, wealth and class processes Spanish identity through the bodies of his characters in contradictory terms—tender, combative, gustatory, repulsive. All three films contend with the macho ibérico,a stereotype of Spanish masculinity first established through the gaudy films starring Alfredo Landa that came out in the late Francoist era. What distinguishes Luna’s trilogy is how the use of food and edifices contorts sexuality and sensuality beyond the melodramatic into a humorously surreal portrait of modern Spain.
The first and last of the Iberian Trilogy are of particular interest when it comes to the intersection of food and sex. Jamón jamón is a romance that leans on traditional themes of a tragic love triangle in the vein of Lorca’s Blood Wedding (1932), but which Luna twists into more of a love hexagon involving both mothers of the central couple. The initial triangle is formed when Javier Bardem’s Raúl, an aspiring bullfighter, is employed by the wife of a local men’s underwear mogul, Conchita (Stefania Sandrelli), to break the betrothal between Silvia (Penélope Cruz), a seamstress at the underwear factory, and Conchita’s son José Luis (Jordi Mollà). In La teta y la luna, a young boy called Tete develops a fathomless obsession with breasts after his mother gives birth to a new brother, making a wish to the moon that it bring him one perfect breast full of milk. His wish is granted when a beautiful dancer named Estrellita arrives in town, with her perfect breasts in tow.
Jamón jamón begins with arch symbolism, a zoom out from the dusty industrial highway of 1990s Aragon revealing that the view is framed beneath the hanging bollock of an Osborne Bull, the silhouette of which has come to exemplify Spain in a thousand and one tourist tchotchkes. Luna moves from this centralised image to Javier Bardem as Raúl, bullfighting naked in the moonlight on a local farm he has trespassed in order to practise. This ritual dance, considered innate to Spanish identity all bound up in the national zeitgeist of having cojones (or huevos?)—absurd bravery in pursuit of machismo conquest. From the very beginning Luna is outlining a masculinised ‘Spanishness’ in the starkest of terms, ones that are knowing of touristic stereotypes; and who better to employ these terms than Javier Bardem?
Food in this story is everything. It is desire, it is industry, it is ambition. Silvia and her mother achieve financial independence through her never-ending production line of tortillas. Raúl’s day job is delivering legs of ham for the local ham processing plant Conquistador. The allusions to food as it relates to sex err towards the obscure. The taste of Silvia’s breasts are compared to that of ham, of tortilla with onion. Raúl crunches whole cloves of raw garlic to help with his circulation during workouts, which Conchita ultimately finds unrestrainedly alluring. In the denouement food ultimately takes the form of primal power as Raúl and José Luis battle to the death using the Conquistador ham legs. While cinema as a medium cannot directly stimulate the senses of taste, smell, or feel, this film’s script being heavy with food-related wordplay conjures a mouthfeel of its own. The title is a reference to a children’s game where saying “jamon, jamon, jamon…” in quick succession soon sounds like monja, the Spanish word for nun. Raúl is credited as El Chorizo, a slang term for a small-time swindler. He enjoys calling Silvia una jamona, slang for an alluring, curvy girl (also associated with promiscuity). By aligning the desirable bodies of its main stars with traditional Spanish cuisine, Jamón jamón treats food as both a source of national identity regained, and as a vehicle for a desire not previously permitted in Spanish media for the better part of a century. As with other 20th century fascist dictatorships, sexual morality was heavily censored in both international and national cinema during the Franco era. Even Code-era Hollywood cinema that depicted divorce or adultery would be censored or edited, often clumsily. It is as though this film itself is a banquet, and Luna invites a Spanish audience to sit down and feast, having been starved for generations.
At the business end of the trilogy, La teta y la luna similarly creates a bizarrely sexual relationship between sex and food. As told from a child’s point of view, the line between fantasy and reality is consistently blurred. The women in the local shop blithely flash their tits for Tete, and when he confides to Estrellita that he wants the milk he believes lies in her breast, she gamely takes one out to fire a glorious fountain of it directly into his mouth. Whereas in Jamón jamón Penelope Cruz’s tits are savoury, here Tete is certain Estrellita’s taste better than the two creme caramels he eyes in a local shop, later moving their plate to achieve a desired jiggle, evidential of the infantilism at play in this story. Being a story of a child as told by an adult therefore creates an unnerving tension between a child’s want and a more advanced sexual desire. Tete’s obsession stems from two events: when he observes his mother breastfeeding his baby brother, and when his parents have sex while the baby cries in the corner, his mother begging his father to “fill me with your milk”. Semen and breast milk become interchangeable as fluids of sustenance and desire, and as a young boy Tete is not able to contemplate the difference.
Tete, like the doomed lovers of Jamón Jamón, is allegorical ofa new Spain, wide-eyed in a presently free world, but also hesitant of how to explore desire outside fascist social restraints. The roots of Tete’s obsession indicate a conflict between a more free form of sexuality and the utilitarianism of the Franco regime, which prioritised women as reproductive cogs, and little else. This is evident when Luna interjects a homely vision of maternal bliss as his mother breastfeeds with intense closeups of Tete worrying monstrously at the teat of the baby’s bottle. A closeup on the baby feeding lasts an uncomfortably long time and is interjected with closeup reaction shots of Tete looking unsure and envious. If Tete’s mother is Old Spain, then the alluring French dancer Estrellita is a glimpse of possibility from the outside world. Just as in the 1970s, when thousands of Spaniards crossed the border into Perpignan to watch the banned Last Tango in Paris (1972), the film’s Catalonian setting is tantalisingly close to the jutting, mammillary Pyrenees. Estrellita is exotic yet hopefully attainable by the men (including Tete) who want her.
Food and the body as tools of industry is a present theme in Jamón jamón in so far as sex work and food catering are both featured careers, but in La teta the two are more harmoniously combined in the pursuit of work. Estrellita’s first appearance finds her washing cauliflowers under a hose. These are necessary for the upkeep of her husband’s bankable flatulence, as he is “Fartman Maurice” a touring French entertainer and motorcyclist who can fire darts with the force of his devil wind, and Estrellita is his glamorous ballerina assistant. His main act involves firing a dart that pops Estrellita’s dress strap to expose her left tit. The humour is heightened by the editing and sound coordinating into brilliant punctuation, cutting quickly to a close up of the tit popping out right on cue with the fart sound. Luna is more than happy to combine body humour and titillation, to not take sex too seriously. After all, as Tete’s grandfather says: “People think farting is gross, but there are worse things. Death, war, banks, aeroplane noise, traffic,” and, of course, dictatorship. When Sticky Vicky spoke in a post-retirement interview about her career, she mentioned that the extremity of post-Francoist liberalisation initially hurt the careers of dancers such as herself. Nevertheless it is what led to her inhabiting her creative cabaret act— “In Barcelona they had seen a lot of porn but they weren’t used to seeing something like that.”
La Teta is also bookended by bodies—bodies in a crowd, and bodies piled together in a traditional castell, a revered Catalan tradition where people come together to create a human tower. Tete is the enxaneta, the young boy whose scaling of the tower completes the mission. His father shouts encouragement from the crowd to climb, to show he has the “cojones”. Wide shots show masses of spectators, arms linked in spider webs of communality to create the tower. They fall at one point, scrambled like ants in the dirt, but begin again. After Franco’s death, castells experienced a resurgence as a symbol of Catalonian independence, especially as public spaces were once again opened up for street parties and public gatherings. In the opening scene, Tete is unable to scale the tower, but his nemesis can. Here at the end, once again with the castell, an apparition of Estrellita spurs him on with a flash of one gorgeous boob, and lo, Tete scales the human tower, rewarded afterwards with a suckle at both Estrellita’s tit and his mother’s. Here then, New Spain has achieved a harmony where it can still happily partake of the old mother country’s bounty, while still looking outward to a new world of sexy international relations.
The first and last films in the Iberian Trilogy are a lodestone of creative passion in Spanish cinema, which have come to symbolise the emancipation of a nation’s sexual identity. Though not as internationally famous as the works of Almodóvar, Luna’s work is remembered in Spain as an important contribution to rebuilding the nation. One little confirmation of this can be found on Google Maps, where the Osborne Bull on the outskirts of Peñalba is no longer associated with the mass-marketing of a sherry company, but instead is known as “Toro película Jamón Jamón”.
“It feels weird driving with these,” says Batou (Pilou Asbæk), a man with cybernetically enhanced eyes staring down a street with neon adverts and constantly shifting hologram road signs reflecting in the windscreen. Major Mira Killian (Scarlett Johansson) sits in the passenger seat and injects herself via the bio-digital ports in the back of her neck. As she bluntly explains, “It keeps my brain from rejecting this body.” A clear distinction is made: the brain is ‘my’ but the body is separate – a neutral ‘this’. This line embodies the central tension between the subject and their body; the ghost and the shell. This theme can be mapped onto Johansson’s career in a struggle between her star image and her selfhood.
This scene is from Rupert Sanders’ 2017 live-action adaptation of the Japanese Ghost in the Shell (GITS) franchise, first a manga that was adapted into the seminal 1995 anime film and several popular anime TV series. As an American adaptation of a beloved Japanese IP, GITS 2017 was primed for hostility as soon as it was announced. Following a whitewashing controversy regarding Johansson’s casting GITS suffered at the box office and was relegated to the dustbin of obscurity. But this is not the first time Scarlett Johansson has played a character who explores the dissonance felt between their interior soul and their physical form. Viewed amongst these other roles, GITS warrants a closer look.
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Following the commercial success of The Avengers (2012) Johansson levied her increasing commercial power to star in a diverse range of sci-fi films. In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), she plays Samantha, an Operating System who falls in love with the lonely Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix). As an OS we never see her onscreen; she is only a voice. In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) Johansson plays ‘The Female’, an alien donning a human form who rarely speaks and uses her appearance to seduce and harvest men. In both, she portrays a non-human operative who gains humanity through experience. In the title role of Luc Besson’s Lucy, an accidental overdose of a drug allows her brain to access its full capacity, giving her superhuman powers. Here Johansson’s character feels that she is losing her humanity as her intellect grows and she gains command of space, time and eventually transcends the physical world. Finally, there is GITS with Johansson embodying Major, a cyborg with a human brain in a synthetic body working as an agent in Section 9, a government organisation and wrestling with her humanity. Each of these films dissect and emphasise different elements of her persona: her voice, her appearance and her intellect. If you take the star as auteur, what is it that attracts Johansson to these roles?
It is a widely accepted Hollywood narrative that stars are not born but made: young people are chosen and molded for stardom. At its most cynical interpretation they are manufactured as products to be sold to audiences. This story is echoed in each of these sci-fi films. In Her, Theodore answers a series of increasingly intimate questions so the AI can build a compatible OS for him. Under the Skin begins with the construction of a human body, we hear and see The Female as she learns to speak and dresses in the stolen clothes of a human woman. The novel the film is based on goes into more detail about the drastic surgery the character has undertaken for her job. In GITS we see surgical arms meticulously build Major’s body as her makers discuss what she really is: Dr. Oulet (Juliette Binoche) describes her as a miracle, an autonomous human. Cutter (Peter Ferdinando), the one funding her construction, sees her as a weapon, a product and the future of his company.
Time and again we see a Scarlett Johansson built-for-purpose, and in each of these films we see her challenge her creator and the parameters of her shell; moving from someone else’s object to her own being. Major, Samantha and The Female fight against the limits of their object status to become humanised subjects, echoing Johansson’s own journey as a star. In these roles you see an artist, a woman, exploring the painful parameters of objectification and searching for her own autonomy within and beyond them.
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The filmmakers of GITS were accused of whitewashing the role of Motoko by casting Johansson. But even if this casting came from the (racist) perceived necessity of a white American lead in a major Hollywood movie, it is integrated into the narrative in a thoughtful way. It is revealed that Major is a cyborg whose brain was forcibly taken from a Japanese runaway named Motoko Kusanagi. She is whitewashed and objectified and can only rediscover her humanity by learning about her past and racial origins.
Throughout the film Major is grappling with her identity. As a cyborg she is part-human, part-robot but not fully either. She exists in a liminal space between the two, feeling distant from other humans and uneasy in her identification with other robots. A connection is made between Major and Red Robed Geisha (Rila Fukushima), a companion-bot introduced at the beginning of the film serving clients in a luxury restaurant. Red Robed Geisha suffers double subjugation when she is hacked to kill one of her customers. Major feels guilty when she kills the hostile robot as she identifies with a humanoid machine being used in service to humans. Batou notices this and insists on their difference, but Major is unconvinced.
Major frequently passes for human, but when Section 9’s investigation brings them to a Yakuza club, the suspects clock her as a cyborg and threaten her to make her dance like the other female android sex workers in the club. Major fights back saying “I’m not built to dance”. In this case, it is Major not Batou who draws the line between Major and other androids.
In both instances the robots that Major is compared to are Japanese women who are racialized fetish objects, primarily built to serve men. She relates to their robotic status but perhaps deep down her repressed identity of Motoko recognises them as fellow dehumanised Japanese women. Accidentally or intentionally, GITS 2017 uses sci-fi metaphor to make a commentary on racialized sexism through the depiction of a privileged Japanese woman who is disturbed by the dehumanisation of the less privileged Japanese women around her.
Building on this is Major’s connection to the antagonist Kuze (Michael Pitt), who like Major, was a Japanese teen runaway that was abducted, experimented on and whitewashed. Unlike Major, Kuze was discarded when his cyborg was deemed a failure, setting him on the path for revenge. The use of Michael Pitt is incisive meta-casting. When Dr. Oulet attributes the failure of Kuze to his ‘violent, unstable mind’ you can’t help but think of the rumours of Pitt’s unruly behaviour that contributed to his diminishing on-screen appearances. Building on the themes of globalisation from the 1995 anime, in an unnamed city, in an unnamed country with an international, accented cast that includes Danish Pilou Asbæk, Japanese screen legend Takeshi Kitano as well as French, Romanian, Singaporean and British actors with mixed racial heritage. Despite its overwhelming global dominance American culture is stereotyped as superficial and when the only Americans in the film are deeply troubled whitewashed subjects a disparaging critique of Hollywood whitewashing emerges. This echoes Johansson’s own objectification for the way her personhood is flattened to a superficial image by the industry. When GITS 2017 raises such provocative themes, the questions become: does making it part of the narrative justify whitewashing? Is it enough to suggest these themes, or do they need more exploration to justify their existence?
GITS 2017 concludes with a monologue by Major in which she asserts that her identity is not based on her memories or her complicated heritage, but on her actions. She is neither Mira nor Motoko, but Major: her role and her rank – the proof of her competence. Similarly, Johansson has asserted that her identity is not based on the industry’s limited perception of her. She has taken action to work on films that add nuance to her star image as her characters fight against their initial purpose. To take further control of her career, Johansson founded a production company whose slate includes reteaming with GITS director Rupert Sanders for Rub & Tug a true-crime film in which she would star as a trans man. Even her enormous star power was not enough to overcome this casting controversy and the project was shelved, but it shows a continued desire to explore her on-screen physical presence. Perhaps it’s better to stick to science fiction, where she can explore her physicality and identity via metaphor, which she may do so again in Bride, in which she is set to produce and star as the titular, purpose-built perfect ‘Bride’. In the proposed genre-bending fantasy, Bride escapes her creator to find her own humanity. It’s clear that Johansson is frustrated as ‘Scarlett the Bombshell’ so she strives to become Scarlett the Producer, in an effort to tell this story in new forms. Bride was announced in 2020 and over 3 years later there are no updates. While these various projects remain unmade, one hopes that Johansson can once again explore the tension between the self that inhabits the shell.
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Australian film has teetered between good and bad taste ever since the flourishing of the 1970s, a time when the industry became reborn again after the previous zenith in the 1920s. Often, good taste has been associated with the realm of the cerebral, and bad taste with the fleshy or the visceral. For example, Peter Weir championed exploitation aesthetics with his 1973 film The Cars That Ate Paris before the statesmanlike formalism of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Gallipoli (1981). The early revitalisation of the film industry in Australia was marred by the indecisiveness of where it should head – in the direction of the avant-garde and experimental, or in a more commercially palatable direction. This debate continued throughout the 1970s, but ultimately sexploitation films, which burgeoned in the early epoch, lost out. The Australian film industry didn’t know if sex would sell over the more cerebral endeavours of the petit bourgeois. Perhaps, if Australia had finessed the sexploitation film, we’d enjoy a more avant-garde national cinema fifty years later. After all, Picnic at Hanging Rock is just overrated art-cinema.
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Australian cinema coincided with the birth of the medium as a whole and produced seminal works like Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) and Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke (1919). Tait’s film was one of the first known examples of a feature film about Irish bushranger Ned Kelly. Longford’s film is about Bill (Arthur Tauchert) who lives in Sydney and is down-on-his luck. He falls in love with a woman named Doreen (Australia’s early cinema heartthrob Lottie Lyell) but appears more interested in the cultured Stror ‘at Coot (Harry Young). Bill’s uncouth behaviour and the underlying love story that permeates Longford’s film would inform later Australian films, albeit less traditionally. However, by 1923 American cinema dominated Australian screens, comprising 94% of all exhibited films. With the introduction of vertical integration, the production, distribution and exhibition of films in cinemas were dominated by America’s big five studios (MGM, Warner, Paramount, RKO and Universal) making it almost impossible for Australian products to compete. A long silence drew upon Australian film production, bar the occasional film courtesy of Charles Chauvel or some expatriate. This limited production stemmed from an inferiority complex – tied to wider notions of the cultural cringe – that other anglophone countries could make better films. Arthur Phillips defined the phrase cultural cringe in 1950 in the pages of Meanjin, a magazine devoted to left-leaning cultural criticism, stating, “the Australian reader, more or less consciously, hedges and hesitates, asking himself ‘Yes, but what would a cultivated Englishman think of this?’” This quote illustrates the way in which cultural inferiority historically shaped Australians’ perception of our own cultural output. Thus, Australian film production slipped into the darkness.
The 1970s sought to change this destiny and reinstate the libido of a once strong and rich film culture. The sexual revolution finally swept across our shores as the left-leaning, and much divisive, 21st Prime Minister Gough Whitlam introduced policies for women including introducing contraception and the establishment of paid parental leave, as well as de-escalating Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war after immense protest. However, the most topical debate within Australian film culture during this decade was between the visceral and the intellectual because film financiers were uncertain what direction the renascent film industry should head.
By 1968, Australian film was at a crossroads. Australia had produced a dozen or so films in the 1960s (including the renowned Pom Michael Powell’s They’re a Weird Mob [1966]and Age of Consent [1969]) and the cultural imperialism of other anglophone countries like the United Kingdom and the United States reigned supreme. Due to this severe imbalance, several politicians had sought to remedy the situation but failed – until the 19th Prime Minister of Australia, a Liberal (conservative) named John Gorton successfully established the Australian Council for the Arts (ACA) in 1968, appointing Herbert Cole “Nugget” Coombs as the chairman (a distinguished economist and former Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia). A year later, Nugget created a film advisory committee to tackle Australia’s inadequate film industry. The panel consisted of quiz master Barry Jones (a future cabinet minister under Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke), advertising maverick Phillip Adams (future film financier of sex comedies The Adventures of Barry McKenzie [1972]and The Naked Bunyip [1970]), Peter Coleman (a right-wing Tory) and two others. The panel aimed to reinvigorate an otherwise dormant film industry so that Australia could tell its own stories, in its own vernacular, for its own people.
However, once the money was secured it wasn’t certain which direction the newly formed Australian Film Development Commission (AFDC) should syphon it. On the one hand there was a battle between the intellectual appeal of European art cinema and the more visceral elements of the body like exploitation cinema and schlock. This discourse played out between experimental and avant-garde directors like Albie Thoms and his Ubu films (later transformed into the Sydney Filmmakers Co-Operative) who thought it would be a hoot to make surrealist cinema courtesy of a heavily subsidised government. Alas, Nugget and the Interim Council decided that making gaudy films that were uncouth in nature was the best way to capitalise on the imminent state funding. The AFDC’s initial budget was $1 million, the amount recommended by the interim committee of the film and TV board, a quarter of which would go towards Bruce Beresford’s sex comedy Barry McKenzie. This demonstrates the notion that sex sells more easily and the bastions of commerce and art are inextricable in film.
The council also developed a three-pronged attack to combat the wallowing film industry in Australia; grants for independent film production; a film commission for commercial features; and a film school to ensure ‘disciplined’ filmmaking. In contrast, the high-profile biographer and Brit-at-large Charles Higham, who moved to Australia in 1954, felt that supporting avant-garde film production was the way to go. Suffice to say, Australia was confused which direction this newly formed industry should go.
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Australia was obsessed with flesh and nudity in the 1970s. It adorned the screens of drive-ins, repertory theatres and in mainstream cinemas. A remarkable number of softcore pornos, including The Alvin Purple films (Alvin Purple [1973] and Alvin Rides Again [1974]) and the Barry McKenzie series (The Adventures of Barry McKenzie [1972] and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own [1974]) were made. Alvin Purple was the creation of Tim Burstall, a hippie from the north-eastern wedge of Melbourne in Warrandyte, whose 1969 feature film 2,000 Weeks completely flopped but was an unprecedented example of independent filmmaking due to the dearth of films being produced at the time. The Melbourne film critic Colin Bennett, an early adoptee of auteurism headlined his review of the film with, “banality lets down our great film hope,” signifying the backlash that faced independent filmmakers down under. Tits reign supreme in Burstall’s Alvin series as the eponymous character struggles with the attention of every woman wanting to have sex with him against his control. This demonstrates that the bastions of commerce and art are inextricable in film.
Burstall’s short-lived production company Hexagon also made the sex comedy Petersen (1974) and the Mondo documentary about Australian underground sex clubs, Australia After Dark (1975). Later, in 1977, films were made like Fantasm Comes Again (a sequel to Fantasm [1976], concerning characters in taboo vignettes like a gym teacher fawning over his student) pseudonymously credited to the director Eric Ram, more famously known as the genre director Colin Eggleston, who made Long Weekend (1978) and Cassandra (1987). Whilst the sexploitation film never died per se, the appeal of art films – by directors like Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong – outweighed the fleshier films. This transition arguably began to occur from 1975, a watershed year for Australian film when Sunday, Too Far Away, Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Man From Hong Kong graced our screens. It was also the year in which the state-funding body known as the AFDC transitioned into the Australian Film Commission (AFC). This marked a symbolic shift from the scheme of the AFDC which was funding more risque films to the art-house era of the AFC which championed everything from Mad Dog Morgan (1976) to The Devil’s Playground (1976).
Nowhere was this ideological shift better exemplified than in Barry Crocker’s character Barry Mckenzie from The Adventures of Barry Mckenzie and its sequel Barry McKenzie Holds His Own – a Barry Humphrey and Bruce Beresford creation; about an ocker Aussie bloke who desperately seeks sheilas in swinging London but fails miserably. Barry is loud and obnoxious, a stereotype of Australians who end up in backpacker hostels drinking themselves to oblivion. But the McKenzie films were directed by none other than Bruce Beresford, who had returned from a job as a cameraman for the BBC in Swinging London to participate in the revitalised film scene here. As the future director of Tender Mercies (1983), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and Double Jeopardy (1999) it’s fair to say he disowned his earlier films. In fact, so ashamed by his involvement in the films, Beresford refused to be interviewed when Umbrella Entertainment redistributed The Adventures of Barry McKenzie on DVD, leaving it to Barry Humphries to answer questions in character as Dame Edna (Barry McKenzie’s aunt in the films).
Australian cinema lay dormant for decades until the 1970s. Under the watchful eye of several prime ministers there was a movement to revitalise film production in Australia, culminating in the birth of the AFDC, the Australian Film and Television School and the Experimental Film and Television Fund (EFTF). The spark that brought these components together lay in early discussions between the Australian Council of the Arts’ Film Advisory Committee which debated the best way to spend the money. At first Australia championed ‘bad taste’ films and the visceral components of flesh, sex, nudity, schlock and horror, before realising the most palatable cinema to export is that of art cinema. After the success of Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1975 the government introduced policies that favoured narrative cinema and relegated experimental or underground film further to the sidelines. This can be seen in the transfer of the film, radio and television board from the Australia Council to the Australian Film Commission in 1976. In its annual report of that year the Commission stated it would seek to combine, “both the film-as-a-business and film-as-an-art sections of the film industry,” illustrating the film funding bodies ambitions. Furthermore, the emergence of the Creative Development Fund (CDF) in 1978 meant that narrative and the intellect was taking precedence as our national export. The CDF took over the role of the EFTF and provided money for independent filmmakers. The sexploitation film lost out. Australia has grappled with the dichotomy between the intellect and the visceral for decades. It continues to haunt our cinemas today as Robert Connelly releases a state-funded sequel to his tepid Eric Bana-driven franchise The Dry (2020), likely to succeed enough at the box office to warrant a third or maybe fourth film. We don’t make sex comedies any more. The intellect has prevailed.
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Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!
We released three issues in 2023, a venerable trilogy in which we attempted to reorient ourselves in the landscape of film and film criticism. Bleeding Edge was our attempt to examine contemporary visual art from gallery spaces to Youtube via Michael Bay. Our Portals of the Pastvolume focussed on the moments in films that acted in service of transference form one context to another. In The Critic, we asked what it was all for.
The 2023 list functions as a capper to the year’s project. Formal and thematic transgression sits alongside classicism, often in the same film, scene, or moment. Does the dominance of Hollywood product reveal a lack of curiosity on the part of our voters and editorial staff, or simply expose us as broke bitches who cannot afford to visit international film festivals? It’s elementary: this was a year of excellence from the mainstream, and bravo to Radu Jude for pulling so many industrial, social, and emotional concerns together in Cinema Year Zero’s film of the year. As usual, you will find the individual ballots below, alongside our contributors’ ‘discoveries’ of the year.
Cinema Year Zero will return in the spring
Films of 2023
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World (Radu Jude)
For any high-falutin’ producer who ever wondered about the shit their fixer goes through. Jude’s eighth is a Sisyphean rollick through Bucharest following put-upon production assistant Angela. Proudly idiosyncratic, with a Uwe Boll jumpscare. (Kirsty Asher)
May December (Todd Haynes)
Lisps, hot dogs, shared spliffs, a sleeveless dress, a hidden love letter, and a snake are just some of the more tactile elements that Todd Haynes uses to populate this tragic, exhuberant, funny and oh-so-alive American masterpiece. (Ben Flanagan)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)
Scorsese wends this story of localised genocide into an onslaught of dread, such that the audience feels the true horror in being capable only of watching. (KA)
Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan
When you read Das Kapital (in German) for some pussy only to wind up working for the US military and destroying the entire world you get Oppie. Nolan still can’t write women, but a banger’s a banger. (Cathy Brennan)
Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)
Wes Anderson asks questions about himself and his work and comes up with a refreshingly honest lack of answers; it doesn’t matter, just keep telling the story. (Esmé Holden)
The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg)
Sneaking in on a technicality—and with some campaigning—The Fabelmans reveals so much about Spielberg as an artist that cannot be unseen, without ever compromising its deeply felt familial melodrama. (EH)
Afire (Christian Petzold)
A pithy eulogy to the monument of the Serious White Author, albeit one that still finds some small empathy for those who are merely troubled rather than troubled geniuses. (Blaise Radley)
Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan)
Dave Bautista tries to stop the armageddon dressed as Peter Griffin. Each camera movement feels like the slash of a knife, each cut a blunt force trauma. The neurotic death cult of Shyamalan’s cinema reaches a new devastating peak. (BF)
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt)
The reality of life as an artist isn’t fancy gallery openings and schmoozing bigwigs, it’s arguing with your landlord about the hot water and dealing with what the cat dragged in—Kelly Reichardt gets it. (BR)
La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)
Constantly shifting in an entirely uncontrived way, even in the swaying, elusive depths of Alice Rohrwacher’s film it always makes perfect emotional, and maybe even mythological sense. (EH)
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The Ballots
Dylan Adamson
1. We Don’t Talk Like We Used To (Joshua Gen Solondz)
2. Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)
3. The Killer (David Fincher)
4. Laberint Sequences (Blake Williams)
5. May December (Todd Haynes)
6. He Thought He Died (Isiah Medina)
7. De Facto (Selma Doborac)
8. The Sweet East (Sean Price Williams)
9. Abattoir, U.S.A! (Aria Dean)
10. Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality (Rea Walldén)
Discoveries
1. Sweet Bunch (1983, Nikos Nikolaidis)
2. Sound and Fury (1988, Jean-Claude Brisseau)
3. Il Pianeta Azzurro (1982, Franco Piavoli)
4. Poppies and Sailboats (2001, Rose Lowder)
5. L’Eau de la Seine (1983, Teo Hernandez)
6. The House is Black (1963, Forugh Farrokhzad)
7. Topos (1985, Antoinetta Angelidi)
8. Luna e Santur (2016, Joshua Gen Solondz)
9. A Minute Ago (2014, Rachel Rose)
10. A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy (1997, R. Bruce Elder)
Alonso Aguilar
1. El auge del humano 3, Eduardo Williams
2. Asteroid City, Wes Anderson
3. Bobajiztan, AgusFortnite2008
4. Cerrar los ojos, Victor Erice
5. John Wick: Chapter 4, Chad Stahelski
6. Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese
7. Knock At The Cabin, M. Night Shyamalan
8. Nu Aștepta Prea Mult de la Sfârșitul Lumii, Radu Jude
9. Shin Kamen Rider, Hideaki Anno
10. Vuelta a Riaño, Miriam Martin
Discoveries
1. Ahora ya no estamos solos (1973), Pedro Rivera & Enoch Castillero
2. Путёвка в жизнь (1931), Nikolai Ekk
3. Costa Rica Banana Republic (1979), Ingo Niehaus
4. El espejo de la bruja (1962), Chano Urueta
5. Llevame en tus brazos (1954), Julio Bracho
6. La Mayoría Silenciosa (1974), Carlos Freer, Víctor Vega, Carlos Sáenz, Jorge Vilaplana, Amando Gatgens, Frida Liebhaber & Edgar Trigueros
7. Muchachas de uniforme (1951), Alfredo B. Crevenna
8. Na Missão, com Kadu (2016), Pedro Maia de Brito, Kadu Freitas & Aiano Bemfica
9. Native Land (1942), Paul Strand & Leo Hurwitz
10. Zona Intertidal (1980), Grupo Los Vagos
Kirsty Asher
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)
A Life on the Farm (Oscar Harding)
The Sweet East (Sean Price Williams)
Kokomo City (D. Smith)
The Rolling Giant (The Oldest View Part 3) (Kane Parsons)
Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
Pamela, A Love Story (Ryan White)
Knock At the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan)
Omen (Baloji)
Discoveries
West Indies (Med Hondo, 1979)
A Canterbury Tale (Powell and Pressburger, 1944)
Kamikaze Hearts (Juliet Bashore, 1986)
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) ( Cathy Yan, 2020)
Freaked (Tom Stern & Alex Winter, 1993)
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2012)
Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
The London Nobody Knows (Norman Cohen, 1969)
Nostos: The Return (Franco Piavoli, 1989)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)
Nadira Begum
1. Rye Lane (dir. Raine Allen-Miller)
2. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (dir. Kelly Fremon Craig)
3. Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justine Triet)
4. Foe (dir. Garth Davis)
5. The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne)
6. Priscilla (dir. Sofia Coppola)
7. Scrapper (dir. Charlotte Regan)
8. The Taste of Things (dir. Tran Anh Hung)
9. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part 1 (dir. Christopher McQuarrie)
10. Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)
Discoveries
1. The Age of Innocence (1993, dir. Scorsese)
2. My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997, dir. P.J. Hogan)
3. Finyé (1982, dir. Souleymane Cissé)
4. Black Girl (1966, dir. Ousmane Sembène)
5. Kaddu Beykat (1975, dir. Safi Faye)
6. The Bourne Identity (2002, dir. Doug Liman)
7. Mona Lisa Smile (2003, dir. Mike Newell)
8. Pillow Talk (1959, dir. Michael Gordon)
9. Speed (1994, dir. Jan De Bont)
10. Mission: Impossible (1996, dir. Brian De Palma)
Cathy Brennan
Kokomo City
Oppenheimer
Passages
Rotting in the Sun
Bad Behaviour
Shayda
Rye Lane
Youth
Transition
Polite Society
Discoveries
1. I Don’t Know
The Meatrack
The Devil Queen
Empathy
Go, Go Second Time Virgin
Madeleine Is…
Bamako
Decent Men
Anyone But My Husband
Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War
James Brice
In lieu of a proper list – put it down to my significantly reduced diet of new films – here are a few double-bills I code-jammed for you fine folks. By no means top-to-bottom great – any true heads will know there’s two real stinkers below. Like Mac said: “Garbage, really, but: fun to make.”
Here (2023)//Night River (1956)
Red lines, labour/love in the age of biochemistry, man is the most fascinating species.
John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)//Branded to Kill (1967)
Odysseys, one neat, the other unkempt – Suzuki eats genre for breakfast, Wick spews it back out as idiot lore mucus.
Shin Kamen Rider (2023)//Prince of Darkness (1987)
Vibe sciences and the inhuman.
Small, Slow But Steady (2023)//World on a Wire (1973)
A perfect world is still built on lies, but at least it’s for someone: struggle breeds resilience, a tolerance to indignity.
Afire (2023)//La Commune (2000)
Two cinemas: a multitude and a box. A camera is a gun, or it can be a tether. Live a little.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)//The Mother and the Whore (1973)
The past is a building block to the present, and a generation is linear, fluid, still a multitude. The soixant-huitard and the soixant-de-rétard.
The Daughters of Fire (2023)//Islands of Fire (1955)
Molten thought for a freer world.
Sarah Cleary
A perfect world is still built on lies, but at least it’s for someone: struggle breeds resilience, a tolerance to indignity.
“unfortunately, much to my shame, I don’t think I saw ten new movies I really liked last year eek.”
Discoveries
I Don’t Want to be a Man Bulworth Queen Christina Moolaadé Nighthawks Lady Windermere’s Fan Gone to Earth Blue Fritz the Cat Up, Down, Fragile
Wilde Davis
Orlando, My Political Biography by Paul B Preciado Mommy on Drugs by David Leo The Lost Boys by Zeno Graton The Deep Queer Massacre by Matthieu Morel A Thousand and One by A.V. Rockwell The Night Logan Woke Up by Xavier Dolan Killers of the Flower Moon by Martin Scorsese Talk to Me by Danny and Michael Philippou Nowhere Near by Miko Revereza Door Mouse by Avan Jogia
Discoveries Mod Fuck Explosion by Jon Moritsugu Black Box by Beth B. Mi Aporte by Sara Gómez Scaregrow in a Garden of Cucumbers by Richard J. Kaplan The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas by Colin Higgins Alucarda by Juan López Moctezuma Chameleon Street by Wendell B. Harris Jr. The Iron Rose by Jean Rollin Sweet Bird of Youth by Richard Brooks Bell, Book and Candle by Richard Quine
Anna Devereux
The Holdovers (Alexander Payne) Blackberry (Matthew Johnson) May December (Todd Haynes) Tár (Todd Field) Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan) Asteroid City (Wes Anderson) How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Daniel Goldhaber) Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese) The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg) Maestro (Bradley Cooper) (minus Sarah Silverman’s performance)
Discoveries Al-Makhdu’un/The Dupes (1972, Tewfik Saleh) The Exorcist (1974, William Friedkin) The Rose Tattoo (1955, Daniel Mann) The Ladies Man (1961, Jerry Lewis) The Family Jewels (1965, Jerry Lewis) Squirrels to the Nuts (2015, Peter Bogdanovich) Airheads (1994, Michael Lehmann) Hondo (1953, John Farrow) The Mark of Zorro (1940, Rouben Mamoulian) Bottle Rocket (1996, Wes Anderson)
Paul Farrell
1. Saint Omer
2. Oppenheimer
3. Copenhagen Cowboy
4. Killers of the Flower Moon
5. Shin Ultraman
6. May December
7. The Boy and the Heron
8. Rye Lane
9. The Gallows Pole
10. Knock at the Cabin
Discoveries
1. So Is This (Snow, 1982)
2. The Beautiful Room is Empty (Haddad, 2022)
3. Naked Blood (Satô, 1996)
4. Mobile Men (Apichatpong, 2008)
5. A Confucian Confusion (Yang, 1994)
6. All Star Video (Sakamoto, Paik, Garrin, 1985)
7. Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 1944)
8. Deewar (Chopra, 1975)
9. Gregory’s Girl (Forsyth, 1980)
10. The PriceMaster (Perry, Martin, 2001)
Ben Flanagan
1. The Delinquents (Rodrigo Moreno)
2. Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan)
3. Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World (Radu Jude)
4. Pacifition (Albert Serra)
5. Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)
6. May December (Todd Haynes)
7. Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (Frederick Wiseman)
8. About 30 (Martín Shanly)
9. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)
10. The Plough (Philippe Garrel)
Discoveries
Blackhat Director’s Cut (Mann, 2015 via Arrow)
Jerry Lewis films
Messiah of Evil (Katz, Huyck, 1974 via Radiance)
If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (Ormond, 1971 via Indicator)
A trillogy – Three 6 Mafia: Choices: The Movie (Green, 2001) / Silent Hill (Gans, 2006) / Porject X (Nourizadeh, 2012)
Emma Stone in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Waters, 2009)
Wang Bing Films, particularly West of the Tracks (2002), Three Sisters (2012), Bitter Money (2016)
The day I watched 5 beach movies – Blue Crush (Stockwell, 2002) / Puberty Blues (Beresford, 1981) / Psycho Beach Party (Lee King. 2000) / Gidget (Wendkos, 1959) / The Girls on the Beach (Witney, 1965)
Rouben Mamoulien at Il Cinema Ritrovato
Andy Warhol films
Esmé Holden
The Fabelmans
One Fine Morning
In Water
Asteroid City [Honourable mention to his Roald Dahl shorts, The Swan in particular]
For revealing Blake Edwards as one of the great Hollywood directors.
Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992, Mark Rappaport)
For finding the joy in reclamation, even when it doesn’t make sense.
Woman on the Beach (1947, Jean Renoir)
For being so alive and divisive seventy years later [Honourable mention to some other films I saw at Cinema Ritrovato: Queen Christina, The Marriage Circle, Stella Dallas & The Dupes].
Bonnie & Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn)
For cutting through the history that has obscured it.
Mr Vampire II (1986, Ricky Lau)
For the purest cinematic pleasure I felt all year, and the slow motion scene.
A Confucian Confusion (1994, Edward Yang)
For perfectly translating Yang’s style to comedy, and perhaps even deepening it.
Peeping Tom (1960, Michael Powell)
For transforming into another film entirely on a rewatch.
Bulworth (1998, Warren Beatty)
For turning a room from irony to joy.
Magic Spot (2022, Charles Roxburgh)
For finding beauty in strange places.
Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!
Digby Houghton
1. La Chimera
2. Saint Omer
3. The Sweet East
4. May / December
5. Afire
6. The Holdovers
7. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
8. Royal Hotel
9. Stone Turtle
10. Poor Things
Discoveries
Lovesick (Bill Mousoulis, 2002)
Stir (Stephen Wallace, 1980)
Light Sleeper (Paul Schrader)
Richard Jewell (Clint Eastwood)
Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, @ the wonderful Melbourne International Film Festival)
Woolloomooloo (Pat Fiske, 1978) @ the inimitable Artist Film Workshop screening
The Skywalk is Gone (Tsai Ming-liang, 2004)
In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar-Wai, )
Queensland (John Ruane, 1976) @ the ever-so-fantastic Unknown Pleasures
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)
Ellisha Izumi
1. Stars at Noon (Denis)
2. Saint Omer (Diop)
3. May/December (Haynes)
4. Greg Wallace: The British Meat Miracle (Kingsley)
5. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Poitras)
6. Marcel the Shell with Shoes on (Fleischer-Camp)
7. Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse (Dos Santos, Thompson, Powers)
8. Maestro (Cooper)
9. Fair Play (Domont)
10. Sick of Myself (Borgli)
Discoveries
The Tied Up Balloon (Zhelyazkova, 1967)
Targets (Bogdanovich, 1968)
A Bullet for the General / Quien Sabe? (Damiani, 1957)
The Turin Horse (Tarr, 2011)
The Straight Story (Lynch, 1999)
Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvelous Entanglement (Julien, 2020)
Hal/Haru (Morita, 1996)
Place Mattes (Hammer, 1987)
The Pillow Book (Greenaway, 1995)
Stranger and the Fog (Beyzai, 1976)
Amos Levin
May December
The Fabelmans
Evil Does Not Exist
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
Saint Omer
Four Daughters
La Chimera
Killers of the Flower Moon
Priscilla
Escasso
Discoveries
Edvard Munch
The Swimmer
Crash (’96)
Bushman
The Earrings of Madame de…
Bamako
Tale of Tales (’79)
Queen Christina
La ciénaga
Elektra, My Love
The Nightingale’s Voice
Buud Yaam
Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther
Distant Voices, Still Lives
Du soleil pour les gueux
Tokyo Blood
Service for Ladies
Applause
Some More Rice
Mildred Pierce (2011)
Aristotle’s Plot
Sarajevo Film Festival
Man’s Castle
Manhandled (’24)
Vampires of Poverty
Ioanna Micha
1. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things
2. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest
3. Nelson Polfliet’s Portrait of a Disappearing Woman
4. Mohammad Valizadegan’s And Me, I’m Dancing Too
5. David Kennhed’s Blue
6. Hannah-Lisa Paul’s Riten.
7. Inga Elin Marakatt’s Unborn Biru
8. Claudius Gentinetta’s Think Something Nice
9. Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge
10. Roosa Vuokkola’s How to Take Care of Your Parakeet
Discoveries
1. Alice Diop’s Saint Omer
2. Carol Reed’s The Third Man
3. Terence Malick’s Knight of Cups
4. Miruna Minculescu’s Fragmentations
5. Sofia Ose’s A Small Circle
6. Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage
7. Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari
8. Florencia Wehbe’s Paula
9. Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’s Dry Ground Burning
10. Despina Mauridou’s Hussies
Sam Moore
1. Killers of the Flower Moon
2. May December
3. Anatomy of a Fall
4. Poor things
5. The Holdovers
6. All of us Strangers
7. Oppenheimer
8. Godzilla Minus One
9. Evil Does Not Exist
10. Late Night with the Devil
Discoveries
Bergman Island
The Devils
The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter
The Fabulous Baron Munchausen
F For Fake
Holiday
Ikirae XB 1
Moonstruck
Out of the Past
Tropical Malady
Joseph Owen
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World | Radu Jude | 2023 | 2h 43m (Palacinema, Locarno)
The Human Surge 3 | Eduardo Williams | 2023 | 2h 1m (Teatro Kursaal, Locarno)
The House of Mirth | Terence Davies | 2000 | 2h 20m
Hello, It’s Me | Frunze Dovlatyan | 1966 | 2h 17m
Trouble in Paradise | Ernst Lubitsch | 1932 | 1h 23m
Maximilien Luc Proctor
to open a window (Craig Scheihing)
Hier & Elders / Here & Elsewhere (Bram Ruiter)
that what moves: does the leaf know + fingerinesses (Blanca García )
I./II./III. (Alexandre Larose)
Pala Amala / Mother Father (Tenzin Phuntsog)
Fale (Antoni Orlof)
in the fishtank (Linnea Nugent)
bleared eyes of blue glass (Park Kyujae)
Sightreading (Nicholas Christenson)
Fluid Fragments (MLP)
Music (Angela Schanelec)
Samsara (Lois Patiño)
Discoveries
يس لهم وجود / They Do Not Exist (Mustafa Abu Ali, 1974)
An Explanation: (and then burn the ashes) (Annemarie Jacir, 2006)
Trapline (Ellie Epp, 1975)
Gestures (Vincent Guilbert, 2017)
off (I don’t know when to stop) (Erica Sheu, 2021)
기억의 표면, 표면에 대한 기억 / Surface of Memory, Memory on Surface (Lee Jang-wook, 1999)
Healing Ray (Jorge Suárez-Quiñones Rivas, 2021)
Mélodie de brumes à Paris / Mist Melodies in Paris (Julius-Amédée Laou, 1985)
Mati Manas / Mind of Clay (Mani Kaul, 1985)
Sales images / Dirty Images (Rémy Beausoleil, Michel DeGagné & Michel Gélinas, 1988)
Beavers (Stephen Low, 1988)
Blaise Radley
Pacifiction (Albert Serra)
The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg)
Youth (Spring) (Wang Bing)
Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball)
Trenque Lauquen (Laura Citarella)
May December (Todd Haynes)
The Plains (David Easteal)
Shin Kamen Rider (Hideaki Anno)
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt)
Discoveries
A Moment of Romance (Chan, 1990)
The Doom Generation (Araki, 1995)
Exotica (Egoyan, 1994)
Glen or Glenda (Wood, 1953)
The Graceful Brute (Kawashima, 1962)
Hyenas (Mambéty, 1992)
The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Anger, 1954)
One False Move (Franklin, 1991)
Two Years at Sea (Rivers, 2011)
Three Outlaw Samurai (Gosha, 1964)
Orla Smith
1. Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt)
2. 32 Sounds (Sam Green)
3. A Still Small Voice (Luke Lorentzen)
4. Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)
5. Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)
6. Love Life (Koji Fukada)
7. Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
8. How to Have Sex (Molly Manning Walker)
9. Searchers (Pacho Velez)
10. Fremont (Babak Jalali)
Discoveries
The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928) / The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) — I discovered that there’s nothing like seeing a silent film in the cinema with a live score.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (William Greaves, 1968) — I discovered that the best word to describe this classic, important, seminal text of a film is “cheeky”.
Sweet Charity (Bob Fosse, 1969) — I discovered that this might be a great film to show the musical skeptics in my life, because it’s darker than a lot of classic musicals, it pokes fun at the plot conventions associated with classic musicals, but it’s also very much a classic musical in all the very best ways.
Claudine (John Berry, 1974) — thanks to Cinema Rediscovered, I discovered a ‘70s New York classic that is rarely ever namechecked amongst the classics.
New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, 1977) — I discovered that this is Martin Scorsese’s best film and everyone who thinks it’s bad is wrong on a level I cannot comprehend.
Twilight (György Fehér, 1990) — I discovered that a film can be both deeply unsettling and incredibly aesthetically soothing
Postcards from the Edge (Mike Nichols, 1990) — I discovered that Carrie Fisher should have written many more screenplays than she did.
What Happened Was… (Tom Noonan, 1994) — I discovered that, of course, a movie about two lonely people trying to tell each other things about themselves is a horror movie.
The Straight Story (Lynch, 1999) / Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006) — I discovered my favourite Lynch film in The Straight Story, and with Inland Empire, that being practically asleep for the entire middle act of a film can be a feature instead of a bug.
Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001) — I discovered that a film that is sort-of responsible for Downton Abbey could be this funny, biting, complex, and moving.
Fedor Tot
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)
The Outwaters (Robbie Banfitch)
Afire (Christian Petzold)
Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan)
Red Rooms (Pascal Plante)
Small, Slow but Steady (Sho Miyake)
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude)
Have You Seen This Woman? (Dušan Zorić / Matija Gluščević)
The New Boy (Warwick Thornton)
Discoveries
The Rats Woke Up / Budjenje Pacova (Živojin Pavlović, 1967)
Dancing in the Rain / Ples v dežju (Boštjan Hladnik, 1961)
The Swarm / Roj (Miodrag Popović, 1966)
She-Butterfly / Leptirica (Đorđe Kadijević, 1973)
Strangler vs Strangler / Davitelj protiv Davitelja (Slobodan Šijan, 1984)
Twilight / Szürkület (György Fehér, 1990)
Far from Home / Dar ghorbat (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1975)
Kummatty (Govindan Aravindan, 1979)
The Heroic Trio (Johnnie To, 1993)
Macunaima (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1969)
Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!
The uneasy status of Film Criticism is readily discussed. In brief: this profession, which few have ever made a living from, offers decreasing opportunities for remuneration. This publication was born from anger at the shuttering of Film Comment as a print entity. Now the venerable Canadian journal Cinemascope has, in the last month, announced the ramping down of publication. Even slower-paced criticism finds no way to avoid the reality of spiraling publishing costs against dwindling readership attention. So why try? The major leaguers who cart themselves from festival to festival, offering first-looks and a taste of proximity to cinema’s ‘cutting edge’, whatever that may be, are unable to turn a profit. So perhaps enthusiast-driven writing on niche titles is generative of gripping prose that is unbound from PR spin or urban-chic vanity. Forget the Barclays, the proper game still takes place in the Sunday League.
We are told that the seventh art is a dying or dead form. Box office decline. Diminished interest in ‘articles’. Discourse limited to online spaces which flatten nuance. The hellsite. Criticism is a trashfire. Last night was a movie. So why does film remain of such interest to writers?
Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!
Publisher of multiple Nobel Laureates in Britain, Fitzcarraldo books has made an intervention to the space of film criticism which has gone slightly under the radar. The titles themselves, have all been variably well received and bookstagramably posed with. But just as interesting is the very fact that three books closely related to film have been published by the same house across the span of six months.
In April, Ian Penman’s moving Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors (2023)reached shelves. He who gave Hauntology its pop-cultural context approaching cinema’s greatest burn-out is a delectable proposition. Rather than add to the pile of Fassbinder biography, Penman takes a self-conscious ‘disco ball’ approach: part biography, part criticism, part memoir. Individual films barely get a look in. The Third Generation (1979), In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), and Despair (1978) probably get the most attention. Penman suggests this is a focus on difficult or objectionable works, but all of Fassbinder’s films are to some degree difficult or objectionable. The sections, each numbered, strive for the aphoristic. ‘158. He never stopped watching television. He liked to have it on all the time, a TV screen in every room.’
I feel that. My experience of Fassbinder’s work during early April 2020 was transformative in my approach to watching and understanding film, culminating in a binge of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) over the course of 5 lockdown days around Christmas of that year which reached almost religious purity and dedication. Penman finds it disappointing on a rewatch. ‘[Fassbinder’s] dream of… 1928 Berlin isn’t, as might be expected, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the modernist city. Rather, it inhabits… (not without irony) Fassbinder’s comfort zone: people in bare loveless rooms… repeating the same mistakes, time and again.’ That’s the zone I want to be in with Fassbinder, a lukewarm bath of repetition liable to nod out. Penman, who openly discusses his history with addiction in the book, needs to reject this element of Fassbinder’s work to make it through a revisit.
Brian (2023) by the author-antique dealer Jeremy Cooper, became the feel good book of the summer. ‘Brian!’ people will invariably shout at each other upon recognising another reader. Brian, the character, attends the BFI Southbank almost every day across the novel’s span of four decades. He takes a particularly fond interest in Japanese films. He finds a community of like-minded amateur cinephiles in the foyer. They all carry plastic bags.
Cooper’s book will remind you of John Williams’ Stoner (1965), a simple life given the epic treatment. One feels a life both wasted and truly, emotionally felt time slippages that from sentence-to-sentence take us to increasingly thinning, greying hair. The opening stretch of Brian is so impressively insular that it’s almost a disappointment when the 7/7 bombings take over the narrative for a while. This, Cooper is suggesting, is too great an event for routine-driven Brian to ignore. The only other contemporary reference I caught was the totem of Princess Diana. Brian is revealed, around halfway through the book, to have a traumatic past. Maybe that’s why he plunges into Woman of the Dunes (1964)and In the Realm of the Senses (1976). There seems no other reason to watch them.
In Porn: An Oral History (2023), a chore of a text, Bristol-based Polly Barton interviews various acquaintances – and acquaintances of acquaintances – about their experiences of pornography. While there is clear value in the prevailing notion that people would be happier if they were more open with each other about their porn consumption, this is an odd way to go about it. Barton’s self-regarding approach of only speaking to people with broadly the same economic status and political worldview is ultimately myopic. She rarely takes into account the experiences of sex workers (one participant refers to their earlier work in passing, a moment begging for exploration), or the ways that the porn industry is set up to (dis)empower people other than as second hand information. A chat with a lesbian participant, for example, leads to conversation about the ethics of Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), which reads like people repeating half remembered bits from The Sunday Times Magazine.
There is some notion that this is my oral history, a history of porn consumption that is occuring around Barton, and around all of us. What does this view do, other than reaffirm a gratingly middle-class and ‘emancipated’ (the word recurs through the text) view of pornography as ‘problematic’ (the only word that recurs more)?
Fitzcarraldo laughs in the face of that phrase, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ by providing the consumer with two options: blue or white. That aesthetic joins these three books under one banner of inquiry into the forms and powers of the moving image. This issue of Cinema Year Zero is an effort to do the same. We asked contributors to respond to ‘Film Criticism’. The results are illuminating, showing shared joys, anxieties, and treatments for the current predicament. Most of all, they explain why we bother in the era of the semi-pro.
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Over the course of its (remarkably still ongoing) 34-season run, Matt Groening has only asked that his name be scrubbed from the credits of The Simpsons on one occasion. Let that sink in for a moment. When jerkass Homer refused to give poor old Abe his kidney not once, but twice, Groening’s name was there. When Homer got botched laser eye surgery and his eyes made that horrible sound as they crusted over, Groening’s name was there. When the show’s thoughtful epicentre Lisa, and it genuinely pains me to write this, simped over blue tick punching bag Elon Musk, Groening’s name was there. What travesty against eyes, ears, and all that’s holy could possibly incur such a grave judgement? Well folks, to misquote Homer, “It’s not that tough being a film cricket.”
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Matt Groening was so affronted by the idea of a film critic, specifically one Mr. Jay Sherman (voiced by Jon Lovitz), joining the world of Springfield that he kicked up a public stink. Rather, Groening was concerned that the episode in question, ‘A Star is Burns’ (1995), was nothing more than a thinly disguised advertisement for the show Jay called home, The Critic (1994-95), recently cancelled after one season at ABC and given a second chance at Fox. Proposed as a last ditch attempt to support the show and its creators, The Simpsons stalwartsAl Jean, Mike Reiss, and James L. Brooks, Groening took umbrage with leveraging The Simpsons in such a cronyistic fashion. Mystifyingly, Groening had no issue giving ex-writing staff star Conan O’Brien an extended cameo, talk show set and all, one season earlier. Certainly, by the time Homer was brawling Peter Griffin in 2014, it would seem Groening’s pockets were sufficiently fattened to assuage any moral doubts about crossover episodes. That ‘A Star is Burns’ ended up being stuffed to the gills with all-time gags is besides the point—Jay Sherman was persona non grata, about as popular with Groening as Sherman’s real world counterparts are with the moviegoing masses.
It’s fitting then that the episode in question centres on a series of conflicts between the headline acts from each show, Homer Simpsons and Jay Sherman. Paralleling the growing acrimony between Groening and his old writing partners, most particularly Brooks, Homer (team Groening) and Jay (team Brooks) repeatedly come to blows over a variety of issues, from the last pork chop to the correct way to appraise art. Taken textually, the animosity between Homer and Jay functions as a microcosm of a timeless cross-cultural relationship: Homer, the easily-pleased punter, and Jay, the pompous film pundit. Through the pair’s disagreement about the nature of short-form cinema, ‘A Star is Burns’ raises larger questions about the role of critics as entertainers, tastemakers, and idealists, particularly in the face of perceived biases. Should a nationally televised critic reflect the populist desires of their network’s largest audience segment, in the manner of a tabloid 5-star conveyor belt, or is there some loftier ideal that Jay is striving to uphold? Who, in the end, does such a critic serve, and is his name Homer Simpson?
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You’d be hard-pushed to find a better staging ground for said debate than Springfield. In fact, it’s a survey identifying Springfield as the least popular city in America that serves as the episode’s inciting incident: dead last for science, and rock bottom for culture. Ever the well-meaning busybody, Marge suggests that the city hosts a film festival to drum up some good press, drafting in lauded film critic Jay Sherman to lend the fest some legitimacy. Jay is positioned as everything Springfield isn’t, his respected TV show, New York-derived cultural cachet, and scores of award show gongs a distant cry from his fellow jury members’ escapades, be they Mayor Quimby’s salacious sex scandals or Krusty the Clown’s scoffed-at star turn in FDR biopic Sunrise at Campobello. If Jay’s ensuing clash with Homer—the everyman at the heart of that archetypal Middle American city—feels inevitable, so too does Homer’s resultant plea to Marge for a place on the festival jury, intellectually emasculated and boorishly insistent on the value of his own opinion. In a final twist of fate, it falls to Homer to decide between the viscerally gratifying thrills of Hans Moleman’s Man Getting Hit By Football, and the tender tragedy of Barney Gumble’s Pukahontas. A choice for the ages.
Taken as an artefact of the ‘90s, ‘A Star is Burns’ serves as a reminder of how unassailable TV personalities once were. A major novelty of the episode is in bringing Jay, a Gene Siskel type, down from his monastic ivory tower to interact directly with his audience—if not his week-to-week viewership, then at least those his loquacious critiques of pop culture fluff would inevitably touch at some point in the consumer chain. Our first encounter with Jay comes as Lisa and Marge watch his show Coming Attractions together, tickled by his sarcastic takedown of Arnold Schwarzenegger stand-in Rainier Wolfcastle. As Lisa observes, “He’s smart, he’s sensitive, he’s clearly not obsessed with his physical appearance…” Homer, while briefly present, has only recently shaken off an earlier aspersion that he might be Jewish, and is currently debating the identification of a pimple or a boil (later revealed to be a gummy bear). Of course, Homer is very much the target audience for Wolfcastle’s mindless macho schtick, his frequent viewings of the delightfully over-the-top McBain films marking him as exactly the type of rube Jay would hold in contempt. The showdown between the loveable sofa-bound moron and the well-esteemed sardonic critic is thus set.
What complicates the dichotomy between charming oaf and delicate academic is Jay’s own piggishness. Seated at the Simpson family table for a hearty dinner, Homer and Jay’s stomachs growl at each other in the manner of territorial dogs. More egregiously, having flaunted his awards show silverware, Jay faces off against Homer in a burping contest, winning rather handily—a slightly jarring moment given Homer’s impressive gut, and one that mostly feels intended to establish just how fun and crazy Jay is to a new potential audience for The Critic (perhaps this is where Groening first started his grumbling). Regardless, faced with both his intellectual and gluttonous better, it’s natural that Jay makes Homer feel effete, shown up in his own home and poorly humoured by Marge about her regard for his smarts. Jay’s holier-than-thou attitude—his affected smarm, his ostentatious displays of cultural capital, and his “droll wit”, as Marge puts it—repeatedly serves to distance him from Homer, the average content consumer, in spite of their readily apparent similarities as rotund gourmands.
It’s not until we reach the film festival itself, however, that the main confrontation between the pair unfolds, firmly on Jay’s home turf. To illustrate the prevailing wind, when Homer laughs raucously at Hans Moleman’s aforementioned magnum opus, Man Getting Hit By Football, the rest of the audience remains resolutely stony-faced. This, it seems, is the rarified crowd of Springfieldians that Jay’s sort attracts, above laughing at a pensioner whose private parts make a *boink* sound effect when hit with an inflated ball (few things are objectively funny, but it bears saying that I’m team Homer in this instance). To underline this clash of high and low brow, Jay actively dismisses Homer in front of the entire assemblage, loudly exclaiming, “This isn’t America’s Funniest Home Videos.” By targeting Homer for his enjoyment of rudimentary slapstick, Jay shows how cultural standing can be leveraged by critics with a degree of clout to dismiss other perspectives, even those of their supposed peers—while Homer is also on the jury, it’s obvious the audience would defer to the man they already know from their TV screens. One wonders if it was Chaplin getting his testicles pelted whether Jay might suddenly raise a smile.
All this simmering tension bubbles over when the initial round of jury voting results in a tie—two votes for Burns’ navel-gazing epic A Burns for All Seasons from Quimby and Krusty, their palms slick with grease, two votes for Pukahontas, Barney’s Barfly (1987) riff by way of Koyaanisqatsi (1982), from Jay and Marge, and one vote for Man Getting Hit By Football from, you guessed it, Homer. Marge, for her part, is disappointed in Homer, damning him for picking the “stupidest film”. Jay, meanwhile, takes a more measured approach, appealing to a higher idealism for the cinematic form, and suggesting, erroneously, that there may be better things in life than watching a man get hit by a football. With Marge’s stinging rebuttal and Jay’s entreaty in mind, Homer revisits both shorts, succinctly summarising each of their qualities: “Barney’s movie had heart, but football in the groin had a football in the groin.” After much deliberation, the heart wins out.
The question that remains, however, is whether Homer’s decision was truly his own. As part of an institution that dictates signifiers of artistic quality, Jay’s carries a remarkable amount of sway in the shifting sands of public opinion—a relic of an era where a thumbs down from Siskel and Ebert could spell box office disaster. Tormented by Jay’s intellectual repertoire with Marge, and Marge’s disheartened acknowledgement that she knew from the start that she’d regret putting Homer on the jury, in the end he sides with the academically accepted “correct” answer. Indeed, when Marge congratulates him on his choice, she proclaims, “You voted for the right movie!” As an arbiter of quality, battling against bribery and idiocy, The Simpsons seems to suggest that Jay, and thereby the film critic at large, is intended to shape public opinion rather than service the whims of the everyman.
However, if the Jay Sherman we see on The Simpsons is defined by his unwavering, even obnoxious, integrity, on The Critic Jay is frequently forced to forgo his principles, caught between his dedication to honest criticism and the commercial needs of the hand that feeds him. By introducing money-eyed TV producer Duke Phillips (Charles Napier) into the mix, The Critic turns the tempestuous affair between critic and audience into a volatile love triangle. A typical interaction between Duke and Jay goes as follows:
Duke: “Why the hell do you have to be so critical?”
Jay: “I’m a critic.”
Duke: “No, your job is to rate movies on a scale from good to excellent.”
Jay: “What if I don’t like them?”
Duke: “That’s what good is for.”
The Critic suggests that, in the pursuit of ratings, the populist critic is inherently compromised, forced to entertain rather than simply observe and analyse—a reminder of Groening’s beef with Brooks over pimping out The Simpsons. Even the title of Jay’s show, Coming Attractions, has the ring of an enticement. Robbed of his yellow hue and yawning Simpsons overbite, Jay’s outspoken morals play as more performative, a distraction from his juggled roles of critical voice, pop culture entertainer, and walking talking advertisement. There’s a reason why master of the middlebrow Mark Kermode’s most popular clips on YouTube all revolve around him going on some arm-flailing rant. As Duke so eloquently puts it, “This isn’t art, it’s just mindless pablum for people who can’t read.”
The answer as to who the mainstream film critic is intended to serve remains murky then. Cancelled after only two seasons, it’d be convenient to ascribe The Critic’s demise to the American public’s dislike for critical voices on their screens, but the reality is that The Critic lacked the pound-for-pound joke output and well-gelled cast of its sister show (not to mention an odd obsession with fat Marlon Brando). In many episodes Jay’s profession is only as relevant as Homer’s—a function of his everyday life and a framework to hang narrative conceits off of—and yet, he’s defined by his work in a way Homer isn’t, frequently assaulted by the general public for the perceived snobbery of his criticism; pelted with cakes, smacked with newspapers, booed by children, left to fry in a burning building, and brained with a bottle at a screening of Pinocchio (1940). Tragically, our last enduring image of Jay Sherman on broadcast television is a brief cameo in the background of another The Simpsons classic, ‘Hurricane Neddy’ (1996), locked in Calmwood Mental Hospital repeating his catchphrase, “It stinks!”, ad infinitum. Trapped in a purgatorial state, it seems Jay has been damned by his producers for his critical attacks on Hollywood, by the public for his biting comments, and by true cinephiles for his frequent ad spots and gimmicks. Stuck between three masters and able to please not a one, ultimately it would appear that the critic-cum-entertainer struggles to serve anyone—except, perhaps, themselves.
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Another confession. When I first attended the Locarno Film Festival in 2017, I wrote 33 articles in ten days. During the festival, I reviewed 23 films, interviewed seven directors, summarised two press conferences and wrote one preview. I was paid nothing by my accredited outlet for this masochistic effort, although the festival, unprompted, covered the costs of my flights and accommodation. I was young, grateful and—probably quite importantly—in the first year of my doctoral studies, luxuriating in the bayou of a juicy stipend. I tell myself that I didn’t know any better.
Now—I’m older, otherwise employed and basically thankful that Locarno still invites me along. The website that commissioned me last time has ceased trading. This year, I’ve written a review of Radu Jude’s new film, and I’m writing this article. I’m £50 to the good, pending invoices. Workload is down; income is up. My hotel, while no longer by the lakeside, is still well-situated, close to the piazza. I hang out with friends not seen since the last edition, and I make fresh acquaintances with cineastes and filmmakers, all of whom know plenty more about movies than I do. The sun shines. I take a dip in the lake. I travel up the funicular. Success!
And yet jarring notes sound among all this jamboree talk and itinerary relay—what is going on here, exactly? So, you took annual leave? You’re a dilettante interloper with a vague network of connections? You pilfered an opened bottle of Bianco del Ticino from the press lunch? Your stomach hurts more days than you’d like to admit? The festival has forgotten to scrub you from the mailing list? You used to write a little, you make a poor effort of pitching, and you think that rationalising your diminishing output in a desultory, post-facto sad-voice will save you from a life of scorn or indifference?
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All those things! And yet—again, yet, that simpering conjunction—it’s hard not to wonder about what’s expected of the contemporary film critic and journalist. (It may be worth considering both the separation and conflation of these roles, as well as those of the critic and influencer. How I see it: when I work a lot, I’m a journalist; when I don’t, I’m a critic.) The overall tale is familiar: payment is generally low to non-existent; expenses are variable; collegiality is hard-won; editorial guidance often amounts to pot luck. It’s a pain for PRs, too: there’s less motivation to write about the films they represent if you’re writing for free.
Outlets should always pay, we all agree, for criticism to flourish, for films to be seen, dwelled upon, and written about. But even some of the established freelancers at Locarno assumed they’d be working at a loss. The SAG strikes had nixed their chances of offering lucrative interviews to the bigger, well-remunerated publications. Poor David Krumholtz, following a chunky role in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, was one of the few actors to attend, pottering about the press area, waiver in hand, a faint sadness imprinted in his moustache. Perhaps we shouldn’t overthink this part: go to Locarno, enjoy the films, and if you break even, fantastic. Easier to say (and believe) when it’s not your livelihood.
There are other ways to do a festival: the Locarno Critics Academy, educating 10 aspiring writers, appeared pleasant and productive, while a separate publication, Outskirts, launched at the festival, offering a lush second annual of criticism. (I had a great time doing an equivalent workshop in Ghent, which subsequently allowed me to join the editorial board for the online magazine, photogénie.) The Locarno “minions”—mockingly self-titled—formed an incipient coterie here, attending masterclasses by the likes of Lav Diaz and Albert Serra. I’m told that the director-pair implored the audience to forget about their finances and just get on with the business of making art, but not before outlining their habits of masturbation. The young critics, furnished with these learnings, published reviews and interviews, and their desire to develop knowledge and connections was genuine and affirming.
And yeeeet, remind me how this critical ecosystem is intended to be sustainable. These types of training and exposure may be invaluable, but they exist at a time when such a small price is being paid for the art—or more accurately, the labour—of criticism. Within this context, the learning and networking spiral of these emerging workshops furnishes a sort of young-critics-industrial-complex, a shambly footbridge looping off into nowhere, the planks of softwood hurtling into the chasm. Can these initiatives consistently exceed wide-eyed foundlingdom and foster sincere, satisfying and long-standing careers?
Which leads us to the following necessary question: How can writing on film be developed, transformed and radicalised without a transparent, rigorous and clearly-funded infrastructure? In lieu of this security, critics will always give admiring, adjacent glances towards editing, events, programming and industry sales. We take on other jobs. We rein in our output. We adapt our preferences. We give up entirely. We turn film festivals into a holiday. We feel guilty about it.
Wiser heads advocate for an informal or formal critics’ union, where we tell each other what we are paid, who we know, how we got started, and how we can afford it. There’s some evidence that the savvy, intelligent, hard-working and well-respected among us can carve out a career, even amid the dearth of paying publications. But mainly what’s left is a trail of minor disappointments and what-could-have-beens. In Locarno, one critic lamented the lack of reviews emerging for Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3, even though the embargo had been lifted. For many, it’s a masterpiece that contains images of a type never rendered before on screen. In 2017, they’d have spied the write-up within the hour. In 2023, you’ll have to pay me.
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Film festivals don’t exist if nobody talks about them. The power that the Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto film festivals hold over English-language cinephilia is directly tied to their status as the most-talked about festivals every year – the ones that produce the most amount of news reports, reviews, interviews and gushing reaction tweets. For the filmmakers, none of these festivals are direct producers of financial capital, in the sense that very few of the films shown are ever expected to make their money back, but they are all incubators and producers of cultural capital and soft power. That is their purpose: to be seen and talked about as the most vaunted of cultural institutions, through which they can unlock greater influence within the wider film industry ecosystem.
When film festivals really took off in the post-WWII rebuild, they did so primarily in the form of a national competition, not altogether unlike the Olympics. Over the years, more and more festivals proliferated, many of which set out with specific artistic or curatorial aims. But, as film academic Marijke de Valck has outlined in Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (2007), it’s the last twenty, maybe thirty years in which film festivals have become institutionalised – huge, hulking behemoths, a small cohort of which are seen as too big to fail, nestling themselves in a wider network of corporate sponsorships, public subsidies, and their status as tastemakers of international ‘arthouse’ film, essentially monopolising anything that doesn’t fall under the populist Hollywood blockbuster model or genre movie.
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To this end, many of these festivals – as well as a nearby running pack of mid-level, though equally institutionalised festivals such as Rotterdam, Telluride, Locarno and so on – have long since invested in young talent, through masterclasses, talent development labs and so forth. For an aspiring filmmaker of any stripe, inclusion into a major fest is a potentially career-changing stepping stone, far more so than entry into a vaunted film school. But filmmakers are only the first part of the film festival equation. First, yes, you need the films. Second, you need people to talk about the films. Enter the film festival critic’s workshop.
As the role of the film critic has become ever more precarious, where a traditional route to professionalisation has become nigh-on impossible, film festivals have stepped into the breach to provide an alternative route into the industry. For the uninitiated, the film critic workshop works something like this: you apply, gushing about what a determined critic you are and what a fantastic programme the festival has. You are sometimes accepted, and then you spend the duration of the festival with your cohort watching films, and taking advice from a mentor or mentors, usually an experienced big name in film criticism who might introduce you to a couple of other big names, some of whom may give you a job down the line. That mentor will edit your writing which is to be published usually on the festival website, under its own branding and banner, or at a partner publication with which the festival is working. Importantly, travel and accommodation – the two highest barriers of access to a festival for any young critic – are often subsidised.
Access into these workshops can be a huge benefit for aspiring critics, immediately connecting you to a network of possible employers and colleagues (it’s this networking that’s of far more value than any advice you’re given on your writing). Most of the writers who’ve put their name to this publication are probably children of film critic’s workshops. Shit, most of the editorial board of this publication, and this writer, all took part in the same Cinema Rediscovered workshop at some point. Speaking for myself, that workshop was key – it gave me the tools and confidence to say that I could take film criticism seriously, and absolutely remains an immensely important moment in my criticism career thus far.
But there is an underlying reason why these workshops are now so commonplace, and I don’t think it’s any philanthropic cause on the part of the film festivals to create great film criticism. Film festival institutions are anxious to actively frame the way they’re talked and written about, and the otherwise highly precarious nature of modern film criticism as a living provides a space in which to actively control the optics: the discourse that is vital to the production and retention of cultural capital needs to be shaped in ways which are appropriate and aligned with the festival’s aims. Let’s face it, having a Sight & Sound critic write a report on your festival is not the same as having Alex Billington blog about it; one positions itself as a vital progenitor, producer and gatekeeper of filmic good taste within the English language (whether or not you buy into that branding is not the question); the other once called 911 on somebody using a phone in the cinema. Co-opt the critic, bring them into your festival infrastructure, and you have the opportunity to shape how they position themselves against or with your festival.
Film festival workshops then become a way of self-capturing and self-producing The Discourse™, generating cultural capital without the volatility or potential harsh critique either of independent publications or self-interested bloggers. The work produced under the best of these workshops is nearly always of a high quality. It is sometimes even harshly and provocatively critical of the films screened at the festival (Rotterdam 2023 had its critics respond to Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO to mixed response). But it is never critical of the festival or its festival infrastructure, which does so much to gatekeep and entrench models of inequality within the film industry.
To understand precisely what film critics workshops are looking for, it is worth looking at the type of critic they often pick – which often fits a specific archetype. You generally feel comfortable introducing these people to your grandmother. Young (obviously), wide-eyed, with an academic bent but more or less accessible prose. Their preferences often hue towards a very Mitteleuropan and middle-class standard of ‘good taste’ that the film festival circuit adores – auteur-led works, personal docs, slow cinema. Politically they will generally all be socially liberal, internationalist, but whilst their writing may include all these things it will rarely be openly radical in any form, at least not in the workshop context. Formalism and aestheticism take precedence in workshop film criticism – less politically risky after all. The writing can cut, but it never stabs. It can praise, but it can never tip the scales. Heck, I probably tick most of these boxes.
For the modern-day institutionalised film festival, this perhaps is the ideal critic. Someone who can write beautifully about films but lacks the tools to take a sledgehammer to the industry and reimagine film anew. It’s just the right type of person to continue reporting dutifully on each year’s slate of films, thumbs up or thumbs down, but without interest in exposing the film festival industrial complex as a mass producer of cultural capital and gatekeeping that is wildly out-of-touch with most audiences, existing increasingly at the largesse of publicly-subsidised institutions and largely inaccessible outside of the festival context. Produce enough of these types of critics that the self-generation of cultural capital can continue apace.
Yet, some of the most vaunted workshops – let’s just take Locarno, Berlinale and Rotterdam as being probably the three biggest – tend to highlight and select critics largely not from the global West, but beyond. Their recent intakes are a diverse group including folks from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe. The opportunity to bring together a worldwide, globalised cohort of knowledgeable, excitable, and vigorous critics is an opportunity to unleash some truly brilliant, incisive writing. It’s also an opportunity to widen what you might call a worldwide cinephiliac network – one that nourishes and enriches cinema culture everywhere. Even just by bringing these people in a room together, the workshop manages this.
The writing that emerges would generally feel at home in any international trade publication, but what might be presented as polishing diamonds in the rough to me appears to be an attempt to shear off differences and unique perspectives, producing a particular ideal of what film criticism is meant to look like and read like.
The film festival critics workshop is therefore only incidentally a space for critics to practise their work and flourish – it is really a space for the festival to produce the cultural capital it in turn needs to survive and justify its continuing existence. When you consider that most festivals operate on a mixture of public subsidies, private sponsorships and general audience ticket sales, then the proximity to cultural capital is an essential marketing exercise to give your brand a little edge of high class.
So the critics workshop becomes part a cycle of perfectly fine film critics writing for perfectly fine publications, making perfectly fine work, all producing the requisite amount of cultural capital, and perhaps if a couple are lucky enough they’ll make a living from it – and meanwhile fewer and fewer places exist with both the readership and the editorial bravery to meaningfully break this cycle. In the modern neoliberal context, a better film criticism culture can only emerge once a separate means of producing the cultural capital is created. What that is, I’m not sure. but I do know this: whilst the film festival critics workshop is a great place to make new friends and find professional contacts, it is not the place to become a great critic. The modern film festival structure simply does not allow it.
(And yes, I will continue to apply for these workshops).
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My first Letterboxd diary entry was created on January 2nd, 2015. It was for The Theory of Everything (2014). I definitely wrote a review of it then, but I don’t know what it said because I’ve deleted it. If you click back to the beginning of my Letterboxd diary, there are very few words left standing — just contextless logs and ratings from a different time. This is a new development. It’s been about two years since I decided to delete some of my old Letterboxd reviews, but the mammoth size of the task, both logistically and emotionally, meant I put it off until a few weeks ago. Finally, I sat down and judged an eight-and-a-half year archive for execution.
Letterboxd is painfully vulnerable, something I no longer seek for myself online. We’re all constantly crafting a persona for ourselves on the internet, whether we’re aware of it or not, and that persona can change dramatically over the course of several years. Letterboxd is not a chronological archive, and I find that terrifying. If someone follows you on Letterboxd, and then they look up a film, they will see your review of that film, whether it was written seven years ago or yesterday. On Letterboxd, you have no control, and limited ability to grow as a writer or as a person in the eyes of your followers. I’m haunted by these past versions of myself, masquerading under my name and my image, lying about who I am and what I think and how I express it. Those versions were emotional, melodramatic, limited in vocabulary, limited in life experience, and limited in their knowledge of what they were still yet to discover about cinema. They were too-open hearted to internet strangers who hadn’t earned their vulnerability. This version — the one I am now — is more reserved, less hyperbolic, less concerned with correct choices and more with interesting ones, more knowledgeable, and more aware of what I don’t know. She cares a little less, in a way that’s healthy. That’s what I like to think, anyway. Maybe in eight years, I’ll be embarrassed by her, too.
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I made the tough but necessary decision to kill my past selves. Over drinks with a friend, we discussed our shared, all-too-frequent experience of getting a notification that someone had liked an old Letterboxd review, clicking through to that review, and cringing. He likes possessing that archive, even if it doesn’t represent who he is now. I admire caring more about the value of the archive than your personal image, but that isn’t me. To embark on this project, I had to think through why I felt compelled to do it, which meant admitting that vanity is powerful. It’s also practical: so many careers in the arts are built online, and maybe someday my minor internet presence will be of use to me as a filmmaker or as a writer. Got to do it for the brand. There’s also the question of privacy. The online world no longer feels like a safe place to store so many raw and private thoughts, so it was time to follow my trail back and clear up the breadcrumbs that I’d scattered along the way.
This August, I found a free morning and opened my Letterboxd to diary page 54. Gingerly, I clicked on each review, as if peering into a haunted house (this was back when I forced myself to write something for every single film I saw, so who knew what kind of awful forced insight or miscalibrated joke I might have gagged up). Sometimes, I couldn’t even read the whole thing, just managing a couple of corny-as-hell lines before I sprang away from the screen and hurled it in the trash as swiftly as possible. Predictably, the whole ordeal was deeply embarrassing, and each DELETE a relief.
I wasn’t quite prepared for how emotionally raw it would feel to sift through all those old reviews; to meet my past selves again. My random attempts at jokes and lengthy, emotional screeds brought me rushing back to the times they were written. I saw how far I’ve come in so many years by plunging back into darker times — mostly, I was investing in the films I watched too much, throwing all of my passion into cinematic stories because there was less to be excited about in life. The way I talked to my tiny Letterboxd audience was erratic; I was comically flippant just as much as I cut my heart out and typed it onto the screen. I wrote about films with a false sense of importance, as if the masses were eagerly awaiting my thoughts on any new release. I kept apologising for my own opinion, so deeply insecure without any awareness of it. Worst of all, I used the phrases “bittersweet melancholy” and “induced tears” (what’s wrong with “I cried”???) just way too much.
In pouring over my Letterboxd archive, a portrait of my last almost-decade began to form, and I saw how my fundamental values and outlook on the world have shifted. It was confronting to read my past self confidently claim that “most people are just trying their best” and wonder, do I still believe that? I’m not sure, but if not, it says a lot about how the last few years have worn down my sense of optimism. When I read my past self writing that “I believe you can fall in love with a film in the same way that you can fall in love with a person,” I was pulled back to the moment I wrote that, and felt nostalgic for that passion — but I’m so far from that feeling now. Back then, I didn’t really know the reality of being in love with a person, particularly the steady, warm mundanity of a long term relationship. Of course it’s not the same thing as loving a film. Those are the lies we tell ourselves when we don’t have access to the real thing. I feel for my past self, who was doing her best to fill that void. I deleted most of the times I bared my heart for the sake of 8 likes, but occasionally I came across a splurge of emotion that was just restrained enough, just thoughtful enough, and just precious enough that I allowed myself to keep it intact.
Those spare instances made me wonder if there was something I could learn from my past Letterboxd selves, before I obliterated them. For almost the entire time I’ve had a Letterboxd account, I’ve also published film criticism professionally for various outlets. I have two separate archives: my ‘official’ writing, and my dashed-off, unprofessional Letterboxd words. I’d much more readily put the former forward to portray myself, but in real terms, it represents me far less. I doubt I would feel nearly as much if I read through that archive chronologically as I did with my Letterboxd. It’s me, but it’s me filtered through the guise of professionalism, and through the eyes of editors who ensured that everything I said was reasoned out, evidence based, could stand up in court.
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While old Letterboxd reviews make me cringe at the less mature person I once was, I’m mostly OK with old pieces of professional writing, aside from feeling like my prose was a little more stilted or underdeveloped than it might be now. It’s a wonderful thing to possess an archive of writing that I believe is mostly well written and in some way valuable. But my past selves are a lot fainter when I read back those pieces. I remain hidden, if not totally then partially, behind the words, a state that was comfortable and appropriate at the time, but no longer inspires me to write. Earlier this year, I stepped down as Executive Editor of Seventh Row, and in effect, put a pause to my ‘career’ as a ‘film journalist’ (is it a career if you probably made a total of about £200 from it in the space of six years?). I’ve been considering if I want to write at all anymore, and if I do, what form it will take. I started a Substack so that I would have a place to post something if inspiration struck, but I have no idea what my identity as a writer is anymore. One of the reasons I stopped is because I fell out of love with it. What would make me excited about writing about film again?
I think I want my writing to feel like I wrote it. I don’t want it to be as painfully raw as those Letterboxd reviews, nor as hurried and spur of the moment. I don’t want it to be all projection and no rational thought. I want the rigour and the reason and analysis that I strove for in my professional criticism, but I want to engage with my emotional response to a piece of art and the context around my viewing of it, rather than shying away from those things.
When I stopped being so vulnerable on Letterboxd, I also began to flinch away from emotional, personal writing, like a finger from hot coals, perhaps because the barely functioning ‘industry’ of film criticism vampirically attaches itself to emotional prose. Bright Wall/Dark Room is one example, considered by some to be the pinnacle of this type of writing among many young hopefuls, which is somewhat problematic given their submission process. A typical BW/DR essay (or at least what they’re most known for) is a long and winding personal journey through the writer’s experience with a film, with the most vulnerable pieces often getting shared frequently by the publication’s fans. They ask for hefty drafts of 2,000 to 4,000 words, with $50-$200 in compensation, and they eschew the traditional pitching process of, well… pitching. Instead of providing a quick bio, samples, and a short description of what the article will become, BW/DR asks for full first drafts to be written and submitted before the writer even knows if they will be compensated for their work. I’ve no desire to write off BW/DR’s entire project, or suggest they’ve never produced valuable work, but this process of finding new writers has always troubled me: the image of dozens of emerging writers delving through their trauma for good material and splurging it out onto the page for a submission, opening wounds for a career opportunity, only to be rejected. I hope there aren’t too many people doing this month after month, sticking their fingers into those wounds to see what else they can drag out.
There’s a place for personal writing, but I’ve anxiously reacted against it over the last few years. Certainly, one cause of that was encountering online confessional essayists in person and realising that, in reality, they were some of the most entitled, narcissistic people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. But the biggest culprit for my distaste is how much Film Twitter congregates around confessional writing, and how, as a result, I felt pressure to find events in my own life to mine for prose if I wanted to gain notoriety as a film critic. That’s something I totally failed at. I once tried to be one of those BW/DR pitchers, but I ended up staring at a half empty page, wracked with anxiety about how much to expose myself. I always, ultimately, chickened out from pitching personal essays because I was too uncomfortable with the juiciest, most traumatic parts of my life to write about them publicly, and any time I did gut myself online — which was always on social media, and mostly on Letterboxd — I only ended up feeling hollowed out the next morning. So I went the other way and threw myself into writing that was rigorous, analytical, borderline academic. I resented it when writers indulged too much in their emotional reaction to cinema, deciding that that kind of writing only tells me about the writer, not the film. The kind of writing I wanted to produce would so thoroughly deconstruct the machinery that makes a film work that the reader would leave the piece understanding what provoked their reaction to the film, whether or not they agreed or disagreed with my assessment of its quality. Honing that skill was infinitely useful, and along the way, I produced work that I’d proudly claim as my own.
Yet I’ve realised that I don’t want to create another archive of work that — in five, ten, or twenty years — appears fairly anonymous to me, just as much as I don’t want to prise myself open to the extent that I used to on Letterboxd, or to the extent that some do for commission. Where do I find that middle path, where writing can be coloured by personal experience while still being valuable for the reader and healthy for the writer? In Juliet Jacques’ Trans: A Memoir (2015), she discusses her complicated feelings around exhibiting her personal life as a spectacle for online readership. She quotes from her Manifesto for Confessional Journalism (2013): “think of confessional journalism, and everything else in your life, as a form of performance art.”
I’m not sure if my interpretation lines up perfectly with Jacques’ intention, and certainly the context around her writing is very different from mine, but her wording here provided me with a helpful way to think about my own writing: as ‘performance art’, which distances itself from ‘me’ and makes it about ‘the character of me’ that I construct through my prose. I used to use Letterboxd as a balm to loneliness, a place to blurt out my feelings hoping that they’d reach someone who might offer care, attention, and connection. I wanted the reader to know me because there weren’t enough people who knew me in real life. I don’t know if that’s the impulse behind all bad personal writing, but it was definitely the impulse behind mine. Now, if and when I continue to write, I will allow myself to appear in my own writing, rather than shying away from any hint of the personal. But I will grant myself privacy by crafting myself into the piece as a character; I have little interest in the reader seeing me so much as I want them to see how my life experience adds context to what I’m writing about.
My Letterboxd, as raw and real of an archive as it was, granted me none of that privacy, so hiding that history away was a necessary act of self-protection. Still, there’s a little sadness to losing such a rich record of my past selves. Call this what you want — an analysis of online criticism, a personal essay, a screed as self-indulgent as my five-year-old Letterboxd reviews — but I call it a plea for Letterboxd to introduce a ‘private diary entry’ feature.
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There is something to confess: your speaker likes to leave a movie theater. Back out on the more or less empty, more or less brightly lit sidewalk (it is invariably at night, and during the week, that he goes), and heading uncertainly for some cafe or other, he walks in silence (he doesn’t like discussing the film he’s just seen), a little dazed, wrapped up in himself, feeling the cold—he’s sleepy, that’s what he’s thinking, his body has become something sopitive, soft, limp, and he feels a little disjointed, even (for a moral organization, relief comes only from this quarter) irresponsible. In other words, obviously, he’s coming out of hypnosis.
The contrite speaker above is Roland Barthes, taken from the opening of his 1975 essay, ‘Leaving the Movie Theater.’ Originally published in the journal Communication, for a special issue on ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema,’ Barthes’ essay alights on a form of experience common to all trips to the cinema but rarely narrated by critics: the strange, dazed state that occurs upon emerging, in which we feel the presence of the material world more acutely and see it through more attentive eyes. But though it is a pleasurable experience, pleasurable enough to need to be confessed, it is also an ambivalent one; confusing and disorientating. How else can the street be “more or less” “empty” or “brightly lit”? These environmental absolutes are modified by the extended spell cast by the film just watched: Barthes notices more upon leaving, and notices even more that these things may not be what they appear to be. He may have left the movie theatre, but as the odd, muddled charisma of Barthes’ prose demonstrates: an element of the experience remains stuck to him. For his part, Barthes makes no effort to shake it off.
In staging the movie-going experience in reverse, and identifying the point of pleasure as the moment in which the cinema is left behind, Barthes suggests a new way of conceiving the art form. Cinema here becomes a mode of experience, coextensive with the world outside, as opposed to a particular site or set of formal constraints. In showing us the world through mechanised means, cinema can re-present the physical world back to us with renewed force. It is precisely because the cinema captures us that we can be released, more attentive and more open, back into the world. If, as the opening of the essay suggests, the cinema is a form of hypnosis then it is a temporary one, one that we eventually have to wake up from. Awaking from hypnosis requires us to come back to our senses, and, in turn, our sense of the world. In showing us the world’s immanence (as opposed to allowing us transcendence) Barthes suggests that the value of film is primarily located in the encounter between the spectator and the world outside, rather than in any specific film. His argument, though a democratic one, is also indifferent to skill, style, or intention. Perhaps this explains Barthes’ need to confess: in admitting to being vulnerable to, and finding pleasure in, cinema’s power of hypnosis he has failed in his job as a critic; failed in the act of discretion, and failed to establish the distance necessary to judge a work based on its formal construction.
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The questions that were being asked when Barthes was writing have dogged cinema since its invention, but are being asked with renewed force in our networked, digitised world: What is cinema? How can we recognise it, and how can it be put to use? Reading Barthes’ post-cinema sensing of cinema, in a post-cinema age, where notions of absorption and attention have become increasingly contested and political, throws light on some of these questions.
In our contemporary environment, highly saturated with screens, the hypnosis Barthes describes risks becoming all-pervasive. We tend to think of hypnosis as something coercive: the substitution of our will for someone else’s, but at the beginning of the essay Barthes only associates his cinema-induced stupefaction with “the most venerable of powers: healing.” Writing of himself in the third person (“your speaker”) he has lost his sense of himself to pleasurable effect. Later on, however, Barthes, now nervous about the consequences of his hypnotism, writes of the contrary, of the cinema’s seductive power, and the completeness of its conquest. “The image captivates me,’ he writes,
captures me: I am glued to the representation, and it is this glue which establishes the naturalness (the pseudo-nature) of the filmed scene (a glue prepared with all the ingredients of ‘technique’).
It is the naturalness of this image that Barthes is threatened by, finding a link between the viscosity of the image and how one can also become ‘glued to ideological discourse.’ Here the cinema’s hypnosis becomes something more coercive: losing oneself allows something else, something disagreeable, to be substituted. It is interesting to read these lines on a laptop: the technology with which we watch moving images may have advanced, and the demands on our senses may have become more acute, but the metaphors we use remain adhesive; we are ‘glued’ to our phones, and feel that we have to ‘peel’ ourselves from them. (The opening of Barthes’ essay testifies to how the process of unsticking can itself become a pleasure. Think of one of the universal rituals of childhood: coating hands in PVA glue just for the satisfaction of peeling it off.)
This distance that Barthes deems essential to avoiding complete absorption in the movies is “not critical (intellectual)” but “amorous”: an analytical, but still reverent, form of engagement—a difference that Barthes’ more figurative language makes clear. Christian Metz’s essay in the same issue of Communication describes the light from the projector as purely functional, “a beam of light,” provided to quite literally project our desires (or an image that we may accept as representing our desires) onto an undifferentiated screen. Barthes, on the other hand, in a passage I love, admires this “dancing cone,” “visible” yet “unperceived,” for delivering a different kind of illumination: “a gleaming vibration whose imperious jet brushes our skull, glancing off someone’s hair, someone’s face.” But why “visible” and “unperceived”? Here the directness of the beam—and the corresponding image of its effectiveness—is dispersed, scattered by the inconvenient, intruding heads of the very audience that it needs in order to function as an ideological tool. In Barthes’ essay, perceiving the cinema as a form of interpersonal connection becomes more than a cute abstraction: the source of cinema—its literal light source—is an intimate touch between strangers, all the more moving for gracing them undetected. That you can be both touched without noticing and moved without knowing it is both the risk and the miracle of cinema. Barthes believes in both.
It is therefore in the presence of distracting strangers, in the intrusion of the extra-cinematic world upon the supposedly hermetic experience of the film, that Barthes finds what may be a solution to complete entrancement: the desiring body of the spectator, what he calls “the perverse body.” Roaming across the cinema hall, Barthes’ gaze oscillates between the image on screen that threatens to seduce him, and the seductive aspects of the surrounding cinema space; most notably the bodies that occupy it. Entering the cinema, Barthes describes himself as:
ready to fetishize not the image but precisely what exceeds it: the texture of the sound, the hall, the darkness, the obscure mass of the other bodies, the rays of light, entering the theater, leaving the hall.
The distraction provided by the erotic components of the cinema, the “absence of worldliness,” “the relaxation of postures”, and “the inoccupation of bodies”, weakens Barthes’ adherence to the image, allowing him to enjoy both the feelings conjured by the film itself as well as the bodies surrounding it. Instead of condemning the lure of the cinema outright, Barthes attempts to describe a desiring, positive-feedback, mode of spectatorship, in which the fascination for the image is extended to all the elements of the cinematic experience. Lured in multiple directions, Barthes can enjoy the cinema without being uncritically absorbed by it.
How can we apply this in a post-cinematic context? It is a given that we lose some of these more immersive aspects of the cinema through home or mobile viewing: the darkness, the size of the image, and the hermetic space. But what do we lose when some of cinema’s essential rituals—feeling the seductive pull of the invisible cone of light, or exiting the building—is substituted for simply putting a film down, or turning it off? If, for Barthes, the political work of cinema takes place in the body’s post-film encounter with the world outside or mid-film awareness of others, is there a way we can reproduce this on our sofas, or at our desks, or on our phones?
Reading ‘Leaving the Movie Theater,’ one would initially think not. The fourth paragraph of the essay makes clear Barthes’ disdain for television, a derision that stems not from the potential distractions afforded by the attendant chintz, but from the fact that the domestic enclave does not distract us enough. In the living room “space is familiar, articulated (by furniture, known objects), tamed.” The prosaic living space speaks to us in terms that are recognisable and mundane, and so we do not hear it, perceiving too effortlessly the sound from the box in front of us. The brightness of the room—its imperfect darkness—frustrates him, not because it competes with the image on screen, but because it inhibits the kind of erotic experience that the anonymity of the cinema allows. Barthes revels in hyperbole: television has “doomed us to the Family,” by which he means the prescribed, the expected, and the safe—a place of “no fascination.” Here there is a bind: How can we become enlivened by a place we already know intimately, without losing cinema or ourselves to the complacent comfort of domesticity?
Here it might be worth risking a rather heterodox statement. Perhaps the more Barthesian domestic viewing experience might be full of the kind of distractions that, on our sofas, make us miss the hermetic space of the cinema: checking one’s phone, a comment from a companion, getting up to have a drink, or perhaps a piss. Each of these interruptions—whilst they may interfere with the continuity of the film experience—brings us back to the “situation” of cinema (always different but retaining these fundamentals): of a body, full of urges and needs, responding to a moving image, and the flickering awareness of these two facts. Though (and here you may speak for yourselves) the twin desires to check notifications or empty our bladder do not have the same erotic charge as Barthes’ cruising eye, they nonetheless testify to the fact of the “body’s freedom,” that he deems an essential component of the cinematic experience: its drive for satisfaction, against or in concert with the film placed before it. It is our desires, suspended in us through their displacement onto the screen, that give cinema the power of hypnosis and can therefore make it dangerous. To feel one’s body shift or incline, even towards the most fundamental or mundane of actions, is both to feel the engine of cinema within ourselves and to feel it separate from the thing that risks our complacency.
What this leaves us with does seem rather unsatisfactory: I’ll admit that acknowledging your bodily functions whilst watching a film is likely to be no one’s idea of radicalism. But if it sounds too much like mindfulness this might be because we now live in a media environment that in many ways feels both compulsive and intrusive: screened media is everywhere, and we can’t stop ourselves from watching it. Barthes ends ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’ by suggesting that what he wants from cinema–and what he hopes his embodied, erotic form of spectatorship achieves–is what he calls ‘a possible bliss of discretion.’ Discretion is the cautious side of choice: having the freedom not to act, as well as the freedom to act. Barthes may describe himself as being ‘glued’ to the screen, but it is nonetheless a state of capture that he actively seeks out and that he consents to enter. He describes his walk to the cinema (the ‘cinema situation’) as ‘pre-hypnotic’: ‘a response to idleness, leisure, free time.’ The loss of cinema as a physical space and the translation of so much of our lives onto digital platforms–not to mention the scripting of one’s exposure to the world through algorithms–means that discretion feels increasingly impossible. The look that desires and the body that feels are both reminders that absorption is optional, not inevitable: we may, in fact, realise what we want is outside a screen altogether.
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As Jean-Luc Godard moved from one medium to another, from prose to filmmaking, he remained a critic. He brought a linear, argumentative style to his films, many of which are about the process—and sometimes the joy—of learning. But his fragmentary polemics were far more suited to an image’s strange mix of definitiveness, since it sits right in front of you, and ambiguity, for there is a less established way to read it. It’s hard to imagine Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98) would make any sense at all as a book-book rather than an image-book. And if Histoire(s) is something like a definitive (insofar as Godard would allow) tome, then his less dense and developed Sixties films are something like essays. Many of them are studies of genre, deconstructions and recapitulations of the kind of films Godard played a pivotal part in reclaiming during his time writing for Cahiers du Cinéma. Breathless (1960) and Bande à part (1964) did this for the gangster film and Alphaville (1965) and Made in U.S.A (1966) did it for the noir.
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Alphaville, while critical in its ways, blew up the noir, and in that tight close-up, alienated from plot and motivation, made it look like a grand battle between the forces of darkness and light. Kiss Me Deadly (1955), one of Alphaville’s clearest antecedents (both films’ detectives run powerlessly from scene to scene revealing as little to themselves as to us) also felt epic and politic, something that Anna Karina’s re-interpretation of the detective in Made in U.S.A agrees is inherently true of the genre. But her film zooms out to the frame surrounding this epic image, it sees the production of it, as the title implies; it looks not just at noir genre, but at genre itself.
In the film’s pivotal scene, the axis on which it spins, Karina’s journalist-turned-detective, Paula Nelson, has a long conversation with a barman who doesn’t like to be called sir and is a comic-strip approximation of a worker, dressed stockily in overalls and a plaid shirt. Said worker, in a typical Godardian paradox, states that “sentences are pointless and empty words”, suggesting that to organise words, and more importantly ideas, into a form crushes them. He goes on to show that grammar is a particularly meaningless and arbitrary structure by whirring out a long line of technically correct but nonsensical sentences like “the ceiling is hung from the light”, “the tables stand on top of the glasses” and “I am what you are”.
In the mouth of his worker, Godard leaves his thesis on genre: like the humble sentence, it too is a subsuming structure, one that forces everything within it into either conformity or divergence from its centering norms. These ideas and narratives are forced into shape by the violent force of film grammar, mirrored in the transitions where Nelson turns her head and tears one scene to the next by the force of the cut. Once meaning is stripped bare, all that’s left is something like The Big Sleep (1946),which leaves its interpretations and plot obscure to even the people who made it.
But another, perhaps more literal, reading of Godard’s attack on structures and sentences is that he was looking back on his own writing. He would turn against his older work many times in his life and, at the time of Made in U.S.A’s release, was only a few years away from the first major turn. In the film’s final scene, Nelson tells an old friend that she’s going to start writing again, turning her experiences during the events of the film into a book or maybe an article, crushing them into those forms, and he tells her she lacks principles. That’s because, as with genre, writing in general, and criticism in particular, can reduce its content—the film it’s supposed to be about, for example—to fit within its normative style and range of arguments. When a critic only asks how well something works rather than what it works towards, the film is left blank and demystified; explained away.
Maybe this wasn’t the case quite as much for Cahiers du Cinéma in the Fifties and Sixties as it is for Sight & Sound today, but Godard’s alma mater wasn’t free of a house style. There is certainly an archetypal Cahiers director, a slightly vulgar (genre and populist) Hollywood auteur who would be reclaimed as a great artist. And it doesn’t take an awful lot of reading to be able to predict, with decent accuracy, which films and directors the magazine will praise, if not the eccentric mix of academia and artistic looseness that will justify it. At the time of making Made in U.S.A, Godard wrote little more than—to borrow the chapter title from Godard on Godard (1972) that covers 1959 to 1967—marginal notes while filming. Clearly there was a greater reason than mere circumstance that his criticism moved from one medium away from another—there was something he wanted to get away from.
At this point in his career, Godard’s linear march forwards was simultaneously about escaping the limits of conventional filmmaking and figuring out why his slippery instincts wanted to escape them. Underneath its noir trappings, when film production is stripped down to the backrooms, garages and warehouses filled with movie posters that Nelson wanders through during the second act, Godard had to confront what was behind the scenes. So does Nelson, and it breaks her. “Politics, money. I wonder why it doesn’t make me puke to have been involved in all that for so long”, she says quietly, bitterly, defeated. Hollywood, as it existed in the Sixtiess, was an extension of Fordism: a dream factory, but a factory nonetheless. Capital is the broader structure, the sentences that criticism and cinema are sealed within.
Therefore, Godard argues, if criticism wants to be of any use, it must be fragmentary and destructive. Over the next few years his films would tear away more and more of the recognisable formalism of Hollywood pictures until all that was left was two people and a black void in The Joy of Learning (1969). From there, he could start building again. Without following Godard all the way into the void, it’s really only being critical that separates criticism from marketing; the only way you can truly advocate for a medium is to push against it as a product. Otherwise, you can only look uselessly back at what’s already been done, like Karina’s detective who admits “If I speak about a place, it has disappeared. If I speak about a man, he’s about to die.”
And yet, Nelson can’t quite let go of her anachronistic sense of heroism, and neither can I. Even after she realises that there is no mystery and no secret behind all the recognisably noirish obfuscation, Nelson wants to continue fighting in her own way. The final scene, though shot on an overcast day, feels surprisingly sunny as she drives with an old friend to somewhere new. There still seems to be some part of Godard that doesn’t want to let go of the Hollywood cinema that he made his name reclaiming as great art, no matter how compromised it is. But he’d spend the next phase of his career dampening out those last romantic notions; it’s almost as if any remaining sentiment he had for Hollywood drove off with Karina. She and Godard would never work together again.
But even in Godard’s darkest and latest work, at the furthest distance from Made in U.S.A, you can still sense some desire for a Hollywood he could live with, for some small glimmer of idealism to shine back through—even if it never did. But that might just be what I want to believe. My instincts pull me as much towards a pure love of Hollywood as Godard’s pushed him away from it. And, especially in the face of his imposing body of work, it’s sometimes hard to reconcile that romantic view with serious criticism. Even if, as Nelson says, driving away with a quiet assurance, “we’ve years of fighting left, often within ourselves”, I’m not sure I’ll ever reconcile those two sides of myself; I’m not sure that fight will ever stop. Maybe Godard would have appreciated the contradiction, or maybe he would have said I lack principles. Either way, I hold tightly to his film that sits at my own uncomfortable intersection.
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