Senses of Cinema. 38.

The first thing to hit you in Issue 38 of Senses of Cinema are 80 names. Eighty. With a list behind each one. Yes, it's the 2005 World Poll, SoC's sixth. "Then, as now, it was not to be a conventional '10 Best Films' list - too reductive a format to allow for the myriad encounters people have with films and film culture over the course of twelve months of viewing experiences," write editors Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray.

The second thing to hit me is the shot of Budd Boetticher right up there at the top. It's Sean Axmaker's, flagging his in-depth biographical and critical analysis, "Ride Lonesome: The Career of Budd Boetticher," years in the making, you might say, and a companion piece of sorts to Sean's interview with Boetticher, which we ran back in December.

More features in #38:

• Frankfurter Rundschau film editor Daniel Kothenschulte on Pensão Globo: "Matthias Müller's films are always about both the eternal and the volatile qualities of cinema."

• Nathan Andersen on the work of the "young and prolific independent Indonesian filmmaker," Faozan Rizal: "The overlap of different art forms is unsurprising in the work of a man who studied and practiced traditional Javanese dancing in his youth, who studied painting before attending film school at La Femis in Paris, and has worked as an actor, director of photography, screenwriter and director."

• Abel Gance's Napoléon, "a super-production if ever there was one... seems immediately comparable in scale to Napoléon's own ambitions," proposes Dean Bowman, adding that this is just the first half of the story. The restoration has been nearly equally epic, with three versions now competing in the courts; what's more, "The story of its difficult reconstruction reminds us of the urgency of film conservation."

There are two interviews in the new issue: Damon Young and Gilbert Caluya talk with Gregg Araki about Mysterious Skin and Maximilian Le Cain talks with Carlos Reygadas about Battle in Heaven.

And there are two pieces on Australian Cinema. Carol Hart "considers [The Proposition's] representation of settler portraits in relation to its themes of indigeneity, family and landscape," and director and producer John B Murray recounts "The Genesis of The Naked Bunyip" and the whole 60s and 70s scene in Australia.

Another pair of articles focus on Nicholas Ray, with Sam Wasson reading Bigger Than Life up close and Carloss James Chamberlin going long and deep on the director's style.

Following up on her pair of pieces on screenwriter Robert Towne in Issue 37, Elaine Lennon turns to Bonnie and Clyde: "It is Towne's work on this film that created his legendary role as Hollywood’s leading script doctor."

A section on "Movies, Music and Soundtracks":

• Direct cinema "(sometimes referred to as 'cinéma vérité')... had a special relationship to the accelerated swirl of celebrity culture in the fresh media, political and popular cultural landscape of the 1960s," writes Tim O'Farrell in an examination of how the work of DA Pennebaker and others shape No Direction Home.

• John Lars Ericson: "Because the realist cinema in its contemporary form is one of the most debated, my analysis of Last Days is meant to serve on the more foundational level of basic realist theory, for the purpose of providing broader critical context in which this film resides in."

• Carole Lyn Piechota analyzes Wes Anderson's use of three songs by Nico, Elliott Smith and Nick Drake "as both catalyst and translator" of Richie and Margot's emotions in The Royal Tenenbaums.

Then, to tide us over for the next three months, there are nine festival reports, eight book reviews, more annotations and top tens and four new profiles added to the "Great Directors" database: Roger Corman, Yoshimitsu Morita, Phillip Noyce and Steven Spielberg.

Posted by dwhudson at February 6, 2006 7:51 AM