Offscreen. Vol 11, Issue 4.

"The recent death of Freddie Francis (on March 17, 2007) at the age of 89 signaled the loss of one of Britain's premier cinematic artisans and one of the last remaining icons of the great Hammer Films studio," writes Donato Totaro in the first essay of an issue of Offscreen dedicated to Francis. As an homage, Totaro analyzes "one of his more interesting films as a director, The Creeping Flesh (1972)."

David Church, introducing his piece, "Notes Toward a Masochizing of Cult Cinema: The Painful Pleasures of the Cult Film Fan": "My starting point will be an understanding of all film spectatorship as masochistic, a theory most usefully advanced by Gaylyn Studlar and Steven Shaviro."

Carnival of Souls "continues to exert a strange fascination for many viewers," writes Peter Wilshire, and we can now add, most recently and impressively, Christian Petzold.

Daniel Garrett reviews Killer of Sheep and then turns to Mark A Reid's Black Lenses, Black Voices, "one of the most intelligent books I have ever read on African-American film - not the one of the most academic, or the most theoretical, but simply one of the most intelligent: it is informed, perceptive, sane, thorough, about much that has been subjected to hysteria, ideology, and pretension."

Philip Gillett looks back on the Bradford International Film Festival.

Posted by dwhudson at June 5, 2007 1:48 AM