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Articles by Daniel Fairfax
Sweet Madness: the 2023 Berlinale
Reader, sometimes it feels like I have been penning film festival reports for an eternity – and not just because of the distension of durée that we have all felt since the days of lockdown. And yet, if I look back over this mass of notes jotted down after intense spurts of film-watching in Cannes, Rotterdam, Vienna, New York or wherever (even, on occasion, in Berlin), a certain absence leaps out at me.
Socialists Should Watch the Films of Jean-Luc Godard
The May ’68 uprising famously caught the country’s political establishment by surprise: its newspaper of record, Le Monde, had proclaimed only a few weeks earlier that “France is bored.” But anybody watching Godard’s films would have been primed for the revolt.
Normality: The 2022 Cannes Film Festival
“Back to normal” was undoubtedly the prevailing ethos of this year’s Cannes film festival.
Man of Cinema: Jean-Louis Comolli
(July 30, 1941 - May 19, 2022) Critic, film theorist and filmmaker, Jean-Louis Comolli died in his adoptive home city of Paris on May 19, 2022, at the age of eighty.
Man of Cinema: Jean-Louis Comolli (July 30, 1941 – May 19, 2022) | Daniel Fairfax
Article NL EN 27.07.2022 Man of Cinema: Jean-Louis Comolli (July 30, 1941 – May 19, 2022) Critic, film theorist and filmmaker, Jean-Louis Comolli died in his adoptive home city of Paris on May 19, 2022, at the age of eighty.
Forms That Think: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard (Introduction)
On June 9, 1971, Jean-Luc Godard suffered from a sickening traffic accident, with the motorcycle that he used to zip around Paris colliding with a van. He was immediately taken to an intensive care unit, and within days reports were circulating that he had died.
Brave New World: the 2021 Cannes Film Festival
How does it feel to return to the cinema? I asked myself this question as my plane taxied on the runway at Nice airport one fine July morning, the shimmering waters of the Mediterranean to my right, the hilly landscape of the Côte d’azur to my left.
The Audio-Spectator: An Interview with Michel Chion
One of the world’s foremost theorists of sound in the cinema, former Cahiers du cinéma critic Michel Chion is also a composer of musique concrète and a filmmaker in his own right.
“Everything is dead but the motor still turns”: An Interview with Albert Serra
It was with some trepidation that I watched Catalonian director Albert Serra’s Historia de la meva mort (The Story of My Death) at this year’s Viennale. After quickly gaining notoriety as an enfant terrible of the festival circuit in the wake of his first two films – Honor de cavalleria (2006) and El cant des ocells (Birdsong, 2008) – Serra’s more recent work has mainly been within gallery environments.
Trade Follows the Film: Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System by Lee Grieveson
Few recent books in film and media studies can match the ambition Lee Grieveson set himself with Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System, and even fewer have delivered in the way Grieveson does.
The Last Film Festival: the 2020 Berlinale
I must confess, loyal reader, that there can occasionally be something of a lag between the end of a film festival that I am covering and the moment when I finally transform my scattered thoughts into a legible festival report. The 2020 Berlinale officially concluded on March 1, and I am writing these lines only a few weeks later. But in that time, an eternity has passed. While journalists from around the world gathered in screenings at the Berlinale Palast, COVID-19 was still a distant thought.
On Watching Movies in Planes: Diary of an International Flight
Thursday, October 3 20:30 (AEST), Melbourne Airport My flight leaves in less than an hour. Boarding has begun, but my zone has not yet been called. A teary good bye to Sylvie and a heated phone call to Emirates about a flight change are just behind me. For the next 24 hours, I will be airborne, as I cross the planet. A brief stopover in Dubai will be the only respite from this constant state of propulsion, before I am dropped off in Nice.
Introduction: Communist Utopians: The Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
The filmmaking couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet were fond of describing their film Der Tod des Empedokles (The Death of Empedocles, 1986) as a “communist utopia”.
The 2018 Cannes Film Festival • Festival Report • Senses of Cinema
“Think with your hands.” Godard’s pronouncement – which the attentive viewer may have heard spring from his mouth two or three times before – opens Le Livre d’image (The Image Book), the latest entry in the hermitic Swiss director’s now six-decade long œuvre, the last four of which have, increasingly incongruously, come under the label of “Late Godard”. It’s an exhortation that we would do well to take seriously, to heed in its literal sense.
Stardust Memories: Cinephilia and Nostalgia (Introduction)
The cinema has always, it seems, been tightly connected with feelings of nostalgia, such that it is not hard to imagine a film-goer in the early 20th century pining for the lost past of the mid-1890s. With the exception of music, the nexus between watching films and feelings of nostalgia seems to be stronger than it is for any other art form. Why is this?
Jean-Louis Comolli
Comolli’s documentary work of the 1990s-2010s has extended far beyond the Marseilles series. Jeux de rôles à Carpentras (1998) and Le monde dans l’arène (2008) looked at the intersections between politics and the media, and both films also featured Michel Samson as their “guide.” Rêve d’un jour (1995) and Jours de grève à Paris Nord (2003) centered on the 1995 general strikes, which revived trade union militancy in France and briefly summoned the specter of May ’68.
Cannes Film Festival 2017 • Senses of Cinema
Cannes, as we all know, is essentially a scandal-making machine. More than any other film festival, Cannes has had controversy baked into its DNA from the very beginning of its now 70-year history, and it sometimes seems as if every year’s edition of the festival requires its quota of notorious incidents to produce the word-of-mouth gossip and sensationalist media coverage that is the oil ensuring the continued smooth running of the engine of Cannes.
Cinema against Cinema: Daech, le cinéma et la mort by Jean-Louis Comolli • Senses of Cinema
Outside of France, Jean-Louis Comolli is principally known in the film studies world for his stint as the editor of Cahiers du cinéma in the years 1965-1973, a period during which his name was attached to such landmark texts as “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”, “Technique and Ideology” and “Film/Politics”. As the titles suggest, it was a period of heightened political radicalism and theoretical exigency.
A Hybrid and Composite Field: Interview with Vinzenz Hediger • Senses of Cinema
With a background in academic research, criticism and film curation, the Swiss-born scholar Vinzenz Hediger is presently Professor of Film Studies at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main. His doctoral work in Zurich centred on the history of film-trailers, and was published in book form in 2001 as Verführung zum Film. Der amerikanische Kinotrailer seit 1912. Since that time his research has taken in the history of film theory, the economics of cinema and the epistemological history of media.
Francesco Casetti Interview • Senses of Cinema
One of the Young Turks of semiotic film theory in the 1970s, counting Umberto Eco and Christian Metz among his mentors, Francesco Casetti established himself as a major figure in the field of film studies in Italy, and his synoptic overview of the discipline’s theoretical lineage, Theories of Cinema, 1945-1990, is still a crucial reference work. Since 2010, he has been the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Humanities and Film & Media Studies at Yale University.
Interview with Jacques Aumont • Senses of Cinema
One of the doyens of French film studies, Jacques Aumont began as a critic at Cahiers du cinéma under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni. After leaving Cahiers, he moved into academia, with his dissertation published as Montage Eisenstein in 1980. He has taught at the Université de Lyon-II, the Université de Paris-III, the École Nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and as a visiting professor at several US universities.
Contemporary Cinema Studies: A Discipline with a Future? (Introduction) • Senses of Cinema
The cinema is in crisis, and it has been since 1895. This is only partly a joke. Louis Lumière mythically remarked that the cinema was “an invention without a future” soon after the first public screenings of the cinématographe, and predictions of its imminent demise have regularly circulated since then.
We Live in a World of Images: Interview with Dana Polan • Senses of Cinema
A professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, Dana Polan has written prolifically on film and television since receiving a PhD from Stanford in 1980 and a Doctorat d’État from the Université de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle in 1985.
Transnational Traffic: Interview with Weihong Bao • Senses of Cinema
Weihong Bao completed her PhD at the University of Chicago in 2006, and is now an Associate Professor in Chinese and Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include Chinese language cinema of all periods and regions, as well as transnational genre cinema, historical exhibition practices, and the history and theory of comparative media, all of which are on display in her monograph Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (2015).
The Possibilities are Still to be Explored: Interview with Angela Ndalianis • Senses of Cinema
Angela Ndalianis is Research Professor in Media and Screen Studies at Swinburne University in Melbourne, and a member of the Senses of Cinema committee. Her research focuses on entertainment culture and the history of media technologies, and how they mediate our experience of the world. Her work has notably focused on the transhistorical nature of the baroque, and the existence of neo-baroque forms in the 21st century media landscape.
Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) • Senses of Cinema
Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend was released in Paris on December 29, 1967, capping a calendar year in which he premiered no less than three features and two shorts, including Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) and La Chinoise. French cinephiles, therefore, could have toasted the new year with a screening of Godard’s latest film. Nothing would have prepared them better for the seismic events that the year would bring.
Their Alabaster Chambers
The phrase “British cinema,” François Truffaut once notoriously said, was a contradiction in terms. If ever there was a filmmaker whose body of work set out to disprove this theorem, it is Terence Davies, whose work is both anchored in the cultural heritage of the UK and permeated by his eminently cinematic sensibility. And yet, while his British roots have remained firmly in place over the last four decades, the Liverpool-born director has also been known to make rare forays across the Atlantic.
Abbas Kiarostami Remembered • Introduction • Senses of Cinema
Abbas Kiarostami’s death this July, at the age of 76, was a moment of profound sorrow for the world’s film community. The affecting images of his public funeral – with the streets of Tehran teeming with mourners gathered around his coffin – were emblematic of the global outpouring of grief for an artist who was actively engaged in the cinema up to the very end. Few filmmakers have had the truly universal appeal of the Iranian. Those who love the cinema also love the work of Kiarostami.
Joaquin Phoenix • The Master film review • Senses of Cinema
As I sat watching P.T. Anderson’s The Master in an East Village cinema during its theatrical release, a curious thought came over me. In the middle of the screening, with the 70mm print unspooling before my eyes, it suddenly occurred to me that the character played by Joaquin Phoenix in the film – Freddie Quell, a disciple of the L. Ron Hubbard-style cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) – is actually a dog. This may, on the face of it, sound utterly preposterous.
“Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still am…”: interview with Jean-Louis Comolli (Part 2)
Editor of Cahiers du cinéma between 1965 and 1973, Jean-Louis Comolli’s foundational place in the history of film theory will be assured by several key texts – among them “Technique and Ideology”, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” and “Young Mr Lincoln” – and his central role in the development of a Marxist theoretical approach towards the cinema in the aftermath of May 1968, along with fellow writers at Cahiers such as Jean Narboni, Serge Daney, Pascal Bonitzer and Jean-Pierre Oudart.
“An exceptional forum to defend freedom of expression”: The 64th Cannes Film Festival
Stepping off the TGV at Cannes-Ville railway station, and onto the Rue Jean-Jaurès early on a Wednesday afternoon, the sentiment becomes palpable. The heaving throng of people being disgorged from the station exits, unceremoniously battling each other to get through to the street, the signs held up for arriving minor celebrities, with limos in abeyance waiting to take them to their luxury hotels, the coruscant sun beating down on us as we surveyed our Mediterranean surrounds.
Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers edited by Felicity Colman
In terms of theoretical scope, the book I currently hold in my hands could hardly be more comprehensive; in terms of ambition, it could hardly be more colossal. With Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, editor Felicity Colman has mustered a clutch of figures from the academy to gloss the contributions of 32 of the most important thinkers to have combined, in various ways, philosophical practice and an engagement with the cinema.
The Tale of Perceval le Gallois and the Young Althusserians
For many reasons, Eric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978) is one of the most remarkable films of all time. We can think, of course, of Rohmer’s translation of Chrétien de Troyes’ 12th-century verse into an idiosyncratic version of modern French, in which the grammar, though versified, resembles modern syntactical forms, but which frequently retains archaisms such as “moult” (“many”, “very”), “oncques” (“never”) and, more predictably, “pucelle” (“maid”), “sire” and “valet”.
The Fever Dream of Filmed Cinema
In Passage, Sabzian invites film critics, authors, filmmakers and spectators to send a text or fragment on cinema that left a lasting impression. Pour Passage, Sabzian demande à des critiques de cinéma, auteurs, cinéastes et spectateurs un texte ou un fragment qui les a marqués. In Passage vraagt Sabzian filmcritici, auteurs, filmmakers en toeschouwers naar een tekst of een fragment dat ooit een blijvende indruk op hen achterliet. The Prisma section is a series of short reflections on cinema.
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