In this concise study, Nicole Brenez argues for Abel Ferrara’s place in a line of grand inventors who have blurred distinctions between industry and avant-garde film, including Orson Welles, Monte Hellman, and Nicholas Ray. Rather than merely reworking genre film, Brenez understands Ferrara’s oeuvre as formulating new archetypes that depict the evil of the modern world. Focusing as much on the human figure as on elements of storytelling, she argues that films such as Bad Lieutenant express this evil through visionary (...) characters struggling against the inadmissible. (shrink)

For most people in the world of cinema, ‘film’ still means ‘feature-length narrative film’, while so-called ‘shorts’ fill another, neglected, undervalued category. However, there appear to be more short films around than ever before – more opportunities to make and also to show them, thanks particularly to digital technology. This article takes the usual reductive characterizations of short audio-visual work – as being, variously, a training ground for future ‘professionals’, a free space where young people can indulge in anarchy for (...) a little while before growing up, or as a calling card for the film industry – and interrogates them in the context of a rapidly changing and evolving media culture. (shrink)

The major essays of the distinguished and prolific Australian-born film critic Adrian Martin have long been difficult to access, so this anthology, which collects highlights of his work in one volume, will be welcomed throughout film studies. Martin offers in-depth analysis of many genres of films while providing a broad understanding of the history of cinema and the history of film criticism and culture. These vibrant, highly personal essays, written between 1982 and 2016, balance breadth across cinema theory with almost (...) encyclopedic detail, ranging between aesthetics, cinephilia, film genre, criticism, philosophy, and cultural politics. Mysteries of Cinema circumscribes a special cultural period that began with the dream of critique as a form of poetic writing, and today arrives at collaborative experiments in audiovisual essays. Throughout these essays, Martin pursues a particular vision of what cinema has been, what it is, and what it still could be. (shrink)