Senses of Cinema. 40.

"And so, Senses of Cinema has reached its 40th issue," announce editors Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray. "To celebrate this milestone, the journal has collaborated with ten artists from the prominent dotmov media arts collective to pay tribute to ten of the world's most important film directors as voted for by readers of the journal.... The idea behind the project titled Either/Auteur... was to take the directors associated with the Top Ten most-voted films and match them with an artist who would in turn create a short experimental film 'inspired' by the chosen auteur's œuvre." Follow the links for more info.

Alex Munt tours and reflects on the exhibition Travel(s) in Utopia, Jean-Luc Godard 1946 - 2006, In Search of a Lost Theorem, the must-discussed summer-long event in Paris open at the Centre Georges Pompidou through August 14:

Travel(s) can be read alongside Godard's eight-part Histoire(s) du cinéma (History/Histories of the Cinema, 1988 - 98) video collage commissioned for television - in particular, as an extension of the final episode, Les signes parmi nous (The Signs among Us). However, here Godard moves beyond the screen, toward the "construction" of a series of spaces in which to house his "signs." This exhibition provokes two main questions: What is the relationship between the moving image and the gallery? And what is the status of the moving image in contemporary (digital) culture?

The timing is perfect, then, for "On Painting and History in Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma," Sally Shafto's follow-up to her piece in Issue 39 on the dialogue between Godard's work and painting.

A second section is devoted to "Three Auteurs":

• John Orr: "Preminger may have lacked the visionary powers of Welles and Hitchcock or their reflexive handle on film form, but as their contemporary during the Studio period his film style is just as distinctive, and at times he could be just as daring. Critically speaking, he became victim of the backlash against auteurism."

• Benjamin Kerstein: "Peckinpah was a heretical filmmaker. This is the key to his significance."

• Pedro-Blas Gonzalez: "Probably far more interesting than their plot construction, Melville's films can be viewed as living, vital axioms that are lived out by his characters."

Lennart Jacobsen traces the history of appearances of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in film from 1930 through 1982 while Felicity Collins "returns to a landmark British-Australian co-production in order to think about how cinema might be involved in the way we remember a city, in this case the antipodal, Alice-in-Wonderland city of Sydney": Michael Powell's They're a Weird Mob.

Michael Korfmann clearly maps out his consideration of Brazilian cinema, setting out to "show the historical context that gave rise to [Mário Peixoto's] Limite, and then cover the reception given to it in the 1960s by Cinema Novo and particularly Glauber Rocha. Finally, the article will look into the relationship between Limite and Walter Salles, today certainly the most successful Brazilian director."

Carloss James Chamberlin on Good Night, and Good Luck: "Those staying a while longer to scratch under the surface should find a rather disturbing attack, McCarthyesque in its ferocity, on an entire generation of toothless Cold War liberals."

"Like Adorno, I see The Great Dictator as a spectacular, well-intentioned failure," writes Jennie Lightweis-Goff. "I differ with him in my conception of the relationship of mimesis to satire."

Cara Marisa Deleon on Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mat (Mother, 1926): "[W]hile the mother symbolizes the ideology of the revolution and the prospects of an untried utopian state, she also possesses the traditional patriarchal ideologies of the crumbled regime, which creates a unique commentary on the state of Soviet society, filled with chaos and revolutionary dreams."

"[T]he systematic use of opera as musical accompaniment" in Match Point "constitutes a first" for Woody Allen. Charalampos Goyios looks into it.

"Desplechin's work is, above all, a cinema of irregularity." Lesley Chow revisits Kings and Queen.

"[A]lthough Miyazaki's heroines can be crusaders, they are not feminists." Freda Freiberg considers a different sort of "sweet young heroine" (shojo).

DVD reviews: Michael Campi and James L Niebaur on Buster Keaton and Noel Vera on Pulse.

13 festival reports, five book reviews, more Cinémathèque Annotations and top tens round out the issue and five new profiles have been added to the Great Directors database: Pedro Almodóvar, Craig Baldwin, DW Griffith, Mike Hodges and Sally Potter.

Posted by dwhudson at August 4, 2006 4:55 AM