Rites of Passage, Fluidity and Metamorphoses: The Imagery of Education in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Innocence, Evolution and Earwig first published by Senses of Cinema, Issue 102, August 2022 Coming of age is often conceptualised in religious terms as a rite of passage and an initiation into adulthood – and so Lucile Hadžihalilović’s films figure themselves as ritualised mysteries, with children at…
Gender Divide in Diptych: Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy first published (in a shorter version) in July 2019 by Senses of Cinema, and also in the book Strickland (2019, Queensland Film Festival) The Berberian Sound Studio – a labyrinthine post-production complex in 1970s Italy to which all the events of Berberian Sound Studio are restricted…
Fragments of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani first published by Senses of Cinema On 22 February 2018, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Let the Corpses Tan was screened at Ciné Lumière in London’s Institut Français Royaume-Uni, with the writer/directors in attendance. The following fragments have been reconstituted from both an interview conducted before the screening, and a Q&A after. On first…
The gender(s) of genre in Cattet & Forzani’s ambisexual cinema first published by Senses of Cinema The strange cinematic experiments of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani grow over the graves of departed genres. Their shorts and their first two features are loving pastiches of giallo, that lurid Italian detective mystery genre which peaked in the…
Alice in the Underworld: The Dark Märchen Show!! first published by Senses of Cinema In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) – children’s novels written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pen name Lewis Carroll – young Alice goes on a wide-eyed odyssey through the psychic flotsam and jetsam of nineteenth-century…
Six Men Getting Sick first published by Senses of Cinema, as part of a series of love letters to 1967 Part of our makeup as social animals is that certain of our activities, when visualised, tend to create a mirror effect in the viewer. See someone laughing, and you may feel unable to resist chuckling…