Senses of Cinema. 37.

Rolando Caputo & Scott Murray take an unusual yet refreshing approach to the editorial that opens Issue 37 of Senses of Cinema, yet open, as usual yet no less refreshing, with a piece on Australian cinema. Jonathan Dawson interviews Sarah Watt, the writer and director of Look Both Ways, and Andrew S. Gilbert, who plays Phil in the film.

Bruce Hodsdon's piece on surrealist documentaries reads like a terrific primer on an "extended checklist" he's working on.

There's a section on US cinema in the 70s and one on Robert Towne:

• Greg Ng: "Network is an example of a hugely successful and critically acclaimed feature film that offers a critique of television, ideology, radical chic and the consequences of American-led post-war capitalism, whilst being funny - no mean feat, and something only barely achieved in the current day by the likes of Michael Moore, et al."

• Bill Blick: "Electra-Glide in Blue is an overlooked film that reveals its ambiguous morality in subtle ways similar to other films of the decade, such as The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972) and The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)."

• John Thurman's smartly illustrated close reading of Taxi Driver lays out all sorts of things you might not have known Scorsese was up to.

• Elaine Lennon offers deep backgrounders on Towne's screenplay for Shampoo and the complex evolution of the screenplay for The Yakuza.

Europe:

• What an opener from Pedro Blas Gonzalez: "If it is true that God is in the details, as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe asserts, then Jacques Tati's films are architectonic temples."

• Crissa-Jean Chappell on the fragmented links between the New Novelists and Alain Resnais's Muriel: The Time of Return.

• Justin Vicari on In a Year with 13 Moons: "In his demoralized state, the only thing left for Fassbinder - his 'existential need,' as he described it - was to 'retreat' into his art and to make this film, which, if it doesn't cure despair, at least articulates it fully and clearly."

Features:

• Ray Davis (more) seems to have inspired this issue's editorial with his piece on Lubitsch's Cluny Brown.

• James Hawco, succinctly, on John Ford's The Horse Soldiers.

• Tag Gallagher (more), not at all succinctly, on Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub and Ford and Kenji Mizoguchi.

• Deleuze got Visconti's The Leopard all wrong, argues Lucio Angelo Privitello.

• Wheeler Winston Dixon: "[I]t is easy to mistake Topsy-Turvy as a departure from [Mike] Leigh's other work."

Noel King discusses Canadian cinema with Blaine Allan.

Seven festivals and five books are reviewed and five new names have been added to the Great Directors database: Alan Clarke, Yílmaz Güney, Joris Ivens, Mitchell Leisen and James Whale.

Posted by dwhudson at October 20, 2005 8:20 AM