Senses of Cinema. 47.

Editors Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray tip their hats to May 68 and cede the floor to Dušan Makavejev, who opens the new issue of Senses of Cinema with a question: "How did I get Otto Muehl and the AA Kommune (Actions-Analytic Kommune) into Sweet Movie?" They weren't rough on him, but they didn't make it easy, either. And then: "At a screening in Taormina, within a minute or two of the Commune scene a few dozen people stood up and ran out of the screening room. And minutes later another three, five and a dozen people left. They were ugly moments. When I went out to hear what they were saying, I found them all watching the film through the exit doors. When the Commune scene ended, they all went back to their seats."

"Many, including myself, were initially shocked and repelled by Makavejev's most complex, explosive and assaulting film," writes Lorraine Mortimer. "In Sweet Movie, Eros and Thanatos are not concepts but forces. Wilhelm Reich, François Rabelais and Jonathan Swift, rather than Sigmund Freud, seem to inspire this never-safe journey, grounded in the senses, a journey which seems like it has land mines placed along the way." Mortimer's book, Terror and Joy: The Films of Dušan Makavejev, will be out in March 09.

In "Slovak Cinema of the 1970s Revisited," Peter Hourigan tugs a forgotten chapter out from under the chapter of the "Czech New Wave."

Think of David Lean and you often think of Brief Encounter, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist; and then, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. But "bridging the gap, are three forgotten films in which the English stage and film actress Ann Todd, who became Lean's third wife, is the central female protagonist, if not the focal point of each narrative," writes John Orr. "The Passionate Friends (1949) and Madeleine (1950) were box-office flops, The Sound Barrier (1952) successful in the main as a novel action picture about the jet technologies of post-war aviation.... The Todd trilogy is an intriguing one, unjustly forgotten, not just for her acting but for her role as muse, as inspiration in Lean's pushing of classical film form, and the stylised oscillation of romance and restraint that shapes so much of his work."

"Henry Hathaway's 1960 film Seven Thieves falls in the heist category," acknowledges Pedro Blas Gonzalez, but it "allows us to re-discover, or re-event, the order of what Edmund Husserl has referred to as the lived-world of experience."

Jason Mark Scott examines the moment that the "buddy movie" became "overtly, strangely homoerotic. What began in El Chuncho, Quién sabe? (A Bullet for the General, Damiano Damiani, 1966) as a paradoxical, almost schizophrenic relationship between two antithetical men was echoed and amplified in Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love is Colder than Death, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969), ultimately reaching its apotheosis in Le Cercle rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970), where the buddy movie finally becomes an unabashed, albeit peculiar, romance: queer in every sense."

Jeffrey Bunzendahl and Robert von Dassanowsky on Casino Royale: "In wanting to keep Bond's mystique and the connections to the Bond history, but desiring to break him from his past beyond the elastic time structure, Daniel Craig's character is presented in every way as being one of a different generation than Brosnan's and all the Bonds he supposedly represents. The new 007 may then be nothing less than the son of Bond."

"The world created in these films was so foreign to my experience in small-town Australia, so strange, so old, so... European, that it became imprinted on my mind as a vision of Europe. And when, many years later, I travelled to Europe and spent time living there, that imprint remained." John Potts: "What I Owe to Hammer Horror."

"In his monograph on Samuel Beckett, A Alvarez famously characterizes the author's trilogy as 'a terminal vision, a terminal style and, from the point of view of possible development, a work at least as aesthetically terminal as [James Joyce's] Finnegan's Wake,'" writes Andrew Schenker. "In the world of film, there have been only a handful of similarly 'terminal' works."

Matthew Boyd on last year's crushed-on, backlashed and backlash-backlashed indie hit: "The viewer is not only subjected to a false approach to the big question of whether there is meaning or legitimacy in prosaic middle-class life and tradition as reduced to routine; in Juno, we find that, additionally, the rite of passage has been completely annihilated."

Angela Dalle Vacche interviews Mahamet-Saleh Haroun (Bye Bye Africa, Abouna and Darratt).

Also in this issue: four DVD reviews, a dozen festival reports, half a dozen book reviews, more Cinémathèque Annotations and one new addition to the Great Directors critical database: Matthew Stephenson on Peter Jackson.

Posted by dwhudson at May 15, 2008 3:10 PM