Senses of Cinema. 32.

To state the obvious right off, the new design does indeed, as Senses of Cinema co-editor Michelle Carey writes, make for easier navigation across the board, and of course, it just plain looks sleeker overall. But Carey has other things on her mind as well: "I fear that in these DVD-saturated times that the traditional sites of film culture are being neglected – those archives, museums and cinémathèques who collect, restore, conserve and curate cinema in its material form."

Then there's the issue itself, almost overwhelming, as always, but perhaps the biggest surprise for a journal like Senses is that the site is being updated almost daily at the moment with reports coming in from the 53rd Melbourne International Film Festival, running through August 8. And there are fest-related pieces as well:

• Michael J Anderson on Jacques Rivette's Histoire de Marie et Julien.
• Acquarello on Kim Ki-duk's Samaritan Girl.
• Volker Hummel talks to Tsai Ming-liang regular Lee Kang-sheng about his directorial debut, The Missing.
• Mattias Frey on Ulrich Seidl.
• Michael Joshua Rowin on Coffee and Cigarettes.
• Darren Hughes on Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms.
• And Jared Rapfogel on Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future.

Then there's sort of a Guy Maddin interlude, with entries from Darragh O'Donoghue and Adam Hart, before the issue opens out onto a dozen substantial "Features." I know it must seem like an utterly ridiculous exercise, this obsessive-compulsive drive to all but reproduce a table of contents, but hopefully, not an objectionable one. I just find it a handy way to sort through tempting offerings, like a child taking notes at a candy store before deciding what to sample first. At any rate, the features:

• Valerie Jaffee turns in two, a consideration of where Jia Zhangke might take his career now that he's legit as far as the Chinese government is concerned, and an accompanying interview.
• Geoff Andrew interviews Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
• Alexander Jacoby on Hiroshi Shimizu.
• Maximilian Le Cain on Bertolucci's The Dreamers.
• Peter Tonguette continues his series of investigations into Welles's fascination with magic.
• Toby McKibbin on Gus Van Sant's Elephant.
• Violeta Kovacsics on Patrice Chéreau's Son frère.
• Mark Richardson on Yoko Ono's Rape.
• Bill Craske on the experimental shorts and features of Bill Mousoulis and Mark La Rosa.
• William D Routt offers a close reading of James Harvey's Movie Love in the Fifties.
• Tag Gallagher on the strange case of Rossellini's TV movies.

In the intriguing section "Beyond the Grave of Genre," Edith Hallberg explains why Willem Dafoe isn't just your average star "commuting... between stage and screen," James Rose digs up mythic elements in Richard Stanley's films, Charles Leary offers another theoretical take on The Matrix, Maximilian Le Cain is disappointed with the way Kill Bill winds down, Charles Spiteri traces the evolution of the phone in slasher films and Patricia MacCormack examines two shorts by Frazer Lee.

Festivals: Janice Tong in Hong Kong, Christoph Huber in Cannes, Brandon Wee in Udine, Brian Darr in San Francisco, Kyle Weise in St Kilda, Saul Symonds in Sydney and Ioannis Mookas in New York, where he took in the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.

Eight book reviews follow, always a favorite section, and eight names have been added to the Great Directors database and the number of annotations and top tens keeps mounting.

Posted by dwhudson at August 1, 2004 1:59 PM