Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday by Ivone Margulies

In Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, Ivone Margulies provides a comprehensive examination of the minimalist visual imagery, deliberate pacing, and recurrent themes of disconnection, wanderlust, isolation, and longing that define Akerman’s intensely personal cinema. Citing Akerman’s penchant for filming the rhythm of everyday life, and her de-emphasis of unique and significant events, Margulies proposes […]

Marguerite Duras (French Film Directors) by Renate Günther

In Marguerite Duras, author Renate Günther examines Marguerite Duras’s films from the perspective of interweaving politics and memory that runs through her body of work. Born in Gia-Dinh in French Indochina (now Vietnam), the only daughter of emigrant teachers Emile and Marie Donnadieu who moved to the colonies in search of a better life, Duras’s […]

Indecent Exposures: Buñuel, Saura, Erice and Almodóvar by Gwynne Edwards

Indecent Exposures: Buñuel, Saura, Erice and Almodóvar by Gwynne Edwards examines the unique influence and residual legacy of the Spanish Civil War on the films of four notable Spanish directors: Luis Buñuel, Carlos Saura, Victor Erice, and Pedro Almodóvar. Edwards examines three Luis Buñuel films, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, and Tristana in order to characterize […]

Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines, edited by Thomas Elsaesser

In the introductory chapter, Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist, Thomas Elsaesser underscores the idea that the singularity of Farocki’s cinema resides, not in the power (or juxtaposition) of images, but in the residual impact of the afterimages that is revealed through a careful editing design, noting that for the filmmaker, the power of cinema […]

The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast by Maureen Turim

Maureen Turim’s The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast, presents an intelligent, comprehensive, articulate, and illuminating critical evaluation of the filmmaker’s subversive, transgressive, confrontational, and provocative body of work. Turim frames the creative and thematic evolution Oshima’s films through the biographical and historical context – as a privileged child from a samurai […]

Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema by David Desser

In Eros Plus Masscre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema, David Desser examines the creative and revolutionary spirit that defined the 1960s Japanese new wave movement (nuberu bagu) apart from the facile identification and synchronicity associated with the coincidental emergence of the French new wave, and more importantly, refocuses his exposition within the […]