Cinema Year Zero

Cinema Year Zero Volume 14: Portals of the Past

Ben Flanagan brings us a round-up of the triumphant Mamoulian programme at the most historiographical of festivals, Il Cinema Ritrovato .

Cathy Brennan evokes productive power in relation to internet video clips of violence against trans women.

James Brice considers Music , Angela Schalenec’s most recent contribution to the Berlin School, and its position in the shadow of German reunification.

Anand Sudha analyses the intersection between antiquated spirituality and the modern in Rossellini’s Europe ‘51 .

Dylan Adamson relays how the heliotropic camerawork of Franco Piavoli lends itself to a world governed by nature rather than the human concept of time.

Wilde Davis examines the use of late 20th-century amateur porn in Kalil Haddad’s new archive-driven short as a means of resisting the rising commodification of queer culture and politics.

Miranda Mungai posits a notion of Online Realism, to pull together strands connecting films as disparate as The Menu and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.

Sarah Cleary braves the Barley setting of Shoreditch to visit People Make Television at Raven Row Gallery, and finds that some of Britain’s most radical televisual communication occurred over 35 years ago.

Cathy Brennan uses a 30-second street interview clip on Twitter and uses it to opine on trans women’s relationship to the camera.

Kirsty Asher strolls through the programming collaboration between Deeper Into Movies and Weird Walk, and its quest to revive sight-specific Weird Britain on film.

The contemporary began on 11 February 2005, when the TV series Nathan Barley first aired on Channel 4. It ended just 5 weeks later, on the same station, with the finale.

Blaise Radley examines the aged but still open wound of Vulgar Auteurism, to ask why this specific notion continues to fuel online film chatter.

Orla Smith casts an eye across the current state of UK film production and distribution, to ask how the humble emerging filmmaker can get their foot in the door. 

If box-office receipts are anything to go by, we are living in the post-theatrical world.

Kirsty Asher’s Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World retrospective calls for a blockbuster cycle driven by physical production and visionary leaders.

Nadira Begum points out the dearth of stars that can move mountains, and argues that the resurrection of the romantic-comedy from the streaming dustbin is the only way to save an actor’s face: beautiful, huge.

Digby Houghton wades through the mire of ‘awards season’ to ask if there is any room for the mid-budget drama amongst the streaming and blockbuster landscape of American film.

Cathy Brennan turns the attention back onto the critics: why do we watch the films we do, and what happens to the films we don’t?

Esmé Holden explores how the precision of Minnelli’s mise-en-scène creates a platonic formula for nostalgia in Meet Me in St. Louis.

Join S Paul as he unspools threads on Justin Bieber, Chicago drill, and theory, in an essay that is both sprawling and tightly interwoven.

Welcome back to Cinema Year Zero. 

Matt Kennedy uses his study of autoethnography to highlight a moment in Kimberly Peirce's 1999 film. 

In her CYZ debut, Esmé Holden locates spirituality within the materialistic world of Max Ophüls’ 1953 masterpiece The Earrings of Madame de…

What is Denpa? Ellisha Izumi unpacks this familiar yet enigmatic Japanese genre.