Senses of Cinema. 35.

"For all intents and purposes, this is a transitional issue," write Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray, the new editors of Senses of Cinema, emphasizing over and again how pressed for time they've been. "Readers will immediately notice that it is more streamlined and contained in the area of content."

Readers might not object. At the very least, #35 is a manageable issue and may not take all of three months to fully digest. And streamlining is by no means necessarily a diminution of quality. Any editor that can score pieces by, say, Thomas Elsaesser (who reviews Heide Schönemann's Paul Wegener: Frühe Moderne im Film) or Tag Gallagher (on the "White Melodrama" of Douglas Sirk) has nothing to apologize for.

And range? It runs wide, from young Matthew Clayfield's vigorous embrace of Evan Mather's "Cyber-cinema" to the weary yet sobering pessimism of Jon Jost, from the informed chattiness of Carloss James Chamberlin's against-the-wind defense of Million Dollar Baby to the academic precision of Alain Kerzoncuf and Nándor Bokor's transcriptions of Hitchcock's trailers.

No complaints here: Five names have been added to the Great Directors database, the annotations keep pouring in, six enticing books are reviewed and so are just as many festivals. New films reviewed, brief encounters with the old, meaty features and the interviews - again, range: Claire Denis, Françoise Romand, Hu Jie and Charles B Griffith. If this is slouching towards summer, it's more becoming than Caputo and Murray may realize.

Posted by dwhudson at April 13, 2005 2:06 PM