Posts tagged: film

Giving voice to inner screams

For the late Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, cinema was always an opportunity for dialogue with the audience. In this essay, Henry Roberts explores the aesthetics and political power of Sembène's cinematic oeuvre.
Realizing Africa

"Through his filmmaking and overall cinematic framework, Sembène realized the dream of a unified and borderless Africa which its political leaders have yet to produce." Matene Toure revisits Ousmane Sembène's 1988 film Camp de Thiaroye, highlighting his life's ambition of inspiring revolutionary action through film.
"Inside the inferno": T. J. Clark on Pasolini

Daniel Ward interviews art historian T. J. Clark about Pier Paolo Pasolini, neorealism, the influence of the Communist Party on post-war Italian culture and the recently published collection of Pasolini writing on painting, Heretical Aesthetics.
Kitsch and woo-woo: cinematic visions of the ultrarich

Recent years have seen a boom in cinematic fantasies of the uber-wealthy where viewers are treated to mass spectacles of excess. But can any of them ever match the reality of the new elite, which is always dumber, more tasteless, and yet still more morally grotty than fiction could allow?
Can the Imperial Logic of Documentary be Repaired?

Zoë Druick asks if documentary films can escape their imperial past, part of the Verso roundtable "Unlearning Imperialism" considering the work of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.
Invisible Labour: Women in the Cutting Room

Emma Pirnay recovers the gendered history of film editing and considers how we can recognise marginalised labour.
When Claude Lanzmann Made Propaganda for the Israeli Army

Claude Lanzmann's five-hour documentary on the Israeli Defence Forces, Tsahal (1994), is a nauseating tribute to an army that supposedly defends Israel but has become an instrument of conquest and oppression
It is Forbidden to Forbid: The Liberation of Desire in France After May 1968

Juliet Jacques and writer and curator Paul Clinton discuss the wave of queer radicalism that followed May 1968 in France.
The Soviet '68

In the Soviet Union, 1968 marked the end of reformist optimism and the beginning of a more cynical era.
Rethinking the Cultural History of Chinese Film: A Conversation with Dai Jinhua

Marxist Feminist film scholar Dai Jinhua, one of the preeminent cultural critics of China's New Left, historicizes the rapid cultural and intellectual developments that took place in China during the 1980s and 90s.
Call for the Film Industry to Defend the ZAD

"We, filmmakers, call on ourselves to bite, to film, and to defend this territory which is beaten and hits back."
Workers Leaving the Factory: From May 68 to October 05

May 1968 stands at the precipice into which the historical labor movement will descend.