Cinema Year Zero

If you access Brown Sugar Too Bitter For Me (2013) via Guyanese director Mahadeo Shivraj’s official YouTube account, the first image that appears is a message in white on a black background: “Piracy is not a victimless crime”.

The camera trembles ever so slightly, the unseen cameraperson weary of its illicit recording.

2012’s Trouble With The Curve opens on a then-83 year-old Clint Eastwood in dialogue with his penis, attempting to coax pee out by berating it with gruff, raspy words.

Detective John Anderton spends his days in the future, solving murders that haven’t happened yet.

During each presentation at the fourth and latest edition of New York’s Prismatic Ground film festival,  which focuses on experimental and documentary cinema, the founder and organiser, Inney Prakash, made it a point to note that the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli, British, and American governments was ongoing.

Think of Arnold van Gennep.

“I shot the movie in 1993,” rasps the unseen director George Sluizer with a Herzog-like Germanic twang, his haggard voice emanating from the screen as it zooms slowly in on a still photograph: Sluizer’s arm is linked casually, almost absent-mindedly, with that of his star River Phoenix, who looks off into the distance (it is unclear whether he knows the camera is there). They are shooting Dark Blo...

The film was dead: to begin with.

The method of cinema invokes the ghost of reality rather than reanimating it, the technology itself the vessel through which the ghost is projected to the seeing eye.

Digby Houghton reckons with the varying fortunes of the Australian film industry, where, for a time in the ‘70s, titillation was successful in getting arses in local cinema seats.

Ellisha Izumi finds the body and mind separated in the works of Scarlett Johansson, parallelling similar tensions between her MCU-superstar status and her personal sense of self.

Kirsty Asher pays tribute to the inimitable vaginal illusionist Sticky Vicky, using Bigas Luna’s Iberian passion trilogy to examine the interplay of food and the erotic in the post-Francoist era. 

Ben Flanagan attempts to make sense of a world mobilised by reaction for reaction’s sake, armed with the Kuleshov effect and Elizabeth Taylor’s curious performance in Identikit.

Joseph Owen recounts his experiences at a Five Flavours Film Festival in Warsaw, in which a new city provides room for thought about how man-made infrastructures impinge on the individual.

“If you can’t bear pain, you don’t live up to your reputation.”

Dan Wilkinson takes affront at the new mode of prudishness ushered in by the internet age, presenting the unfiltered sexuality of experimental films Pickelporno and Sweet Love Remembered as possible antidotes.

The uneasy status of Film Criticism is readily discussed.

Blaise Radley profiles pop-culture’s greatest representation of the film critic: Jay Sherman, the animated hack and one-time Simpsons guest star.

Joseph Owen returns to the Locarno Film Festival, where he casts a sideways the economics of the professional film critic between bottles of Swiss red.

Fedor Tot delves into the world of the film festival critics workshop, asking if its purpose serves less to help individual participants than to uphold institutional compliance.

Orla Smith explores her personal history with the film catalog-turned-social media app Letterboxd as a way of marking changing taste and sharpening perspective.

Natasha Fedorson takes Roland Barthes ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’ as a conduit for her own ruminations on the spaces where we can engage with the medium.

Esmé Holden gives a close reading of the ultimate critic-turned-filmmaker Jean Luc-Godard’s key 1966 film Made in U.S.A.

Kirsty Asher finds Youtube a safe haven for a specific kind of film criticism: analysis of costume design as a key element of the cinematic image.

Wilde Davis pushes against print criticism as an avenue for transgressive film analysis, and instead finds solace in the cinematic reflections of queer artists.