Cinema Year Zero

Digby Houghton reckons with the varying fortunes of the Australian film industry, where, for a time in the ‘70s, titillation was successful in getting arses in local cinema seats.

Ellisha Izumi finds the body and mind separated in the works of Scarlett Johansson, parallelling similar tensions between her MCU-superstar status and her personal sense of self.

Kirsty Asher pays tribute to the inimitable vaginal illusionist Sticky Vicky, using Bigas Luna’s Iberian passion trilogy to examine the interplay of food and the erotic in the post-Francoist era. 

Ben Flanagan attempts to make sense of a world mobilised by reaction for reaction’s sake, armed with the Kuleshov effect and Elizabeth Taylor’s curious performance in Identikit.

Joseph Owen recounts his experiences at a Five Flavours Film Festival in Warsaw, in which a new city provides room for thought about how man-made infrastructures impinge on the individual.

“If you can’t bear pain, you don’t live up to your reputation.”

Dan Wilkinson takes affront at the new mode of prudishness ushered in by the internet age, presenting the unfiltered sexuality of experimental films Pickelporno and Sweet Love Remembered as possible antidotes.

The uneasy status of Film Criticism is readily discussed.

Blaise Radley profiles pop-culture’s greatest representation of the film critic: Jay Sherman, the animated hack and one-time Simpsons guest star.

Joseph Owen returns to the Locarno Film Festival, where he casts a sideways the economics of the professional film critic between bottles of Swiss red.

Fedor Tot delves into the world of the film festival critics workshop, asking if its purpose serves less to help individual participants than to uphold institutional compliance.

Orla Smith explores her personal history with the film catalog-turned-social media app Letterboxd as a way of marking changing taste and sharpening perspective.

Natasha Fedorson takes Roland Barthes ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’ as a conduit for her own ruminations on the spaces where we can engage with the medium.

Esmé Holden gives a close reading of the ultimate critic-turned-filmmaker Jean Luc-Godard’s key 1966 film Made in U.S.A.

Kirsty Asher finds Youtube a safe haven for a specific kind of film criticism: analysis of costume design as a key element of the cinematic image.

Wilde Davis pushes against print criticism as an avenue for transgressive film analysis, and instead finds solace in the cinematic reflections of queer artists.

Cinema Year Zero Volume 14: Portals of the Past

Ben Flanagan brings us a round-up of the triumphant Mamoulian programme at the most historiographical of festivals, Il Cinema Ritrovato.

Cathy Brennan evokes productive power in relation to internet video clips of violence against trans women.

James Brice considers Music, Angela Schalenec’s most recent contribution to the Berlin School, and its position in the shadow of German reunification.

Anand Sudha analyses the intersection between antiquated spirituality and the modern in Rossellini’s Europe ‘51.

Dylan Adamson relays how the heliotropic camerawork of Franco Piavoli lends itself to a world governed by nature rather than the human concept of time.

Wilde Davis examines the use of late 20th-century amateur porn in Kalil Haddad’s new archive-driven short as a means of resisting the rising commodification of queer culture and politics.

Miranda Mungai posits a notion of Online Realism, to pull together strands connecting films as disparate as The Menu and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.

Sarah Cleary braves the Barley setting of Shoreditch to visit People Make Television at Raven Row Gallery, and finds that some of Britain’s most radical televisual communication occurred over 35 years ago.

Cathy Brennan uses a 30-second street interview clip on Twitter and uses it to opine on trans women’s relationship to the camera.

Kirsty Asher strolls through the programming collaboration between Deeper Into Movies and Weird Walk, and its quest to revive sight-specific Weird Britain on film.

The contemporary began on 11 February 2005, when the TV series Nathan Barley first aired on Channel 4. It ended just 5 weeks later, on the same station, with the finale.

Blaise Radley examines the aged but still open wound of Vulgar Auteurism, to ask why this specific notion continues to fuel online film chatter.

Orla Smith casts an eye across the current state of UK film production and distribution, to ask how the humble emerging filmmaker can get their foot in the door. 

If box-office receipts are anything to go by, we are living in the post-theatrical world.

Kirsty Asher’s Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World retrospective calls for a blockbuster cycle driven by physical production and visionary leaders.

Nadira Begum points out the dearth of stars that can move mountains, and argues that the resurrection of the romantic-comedy from the streaming dustbin is the only way to save an actor’s face: beautiful, huge.

Digby Houghton wades through the mire of ‘awards season’ to ask if there is any room for the mid-budget drama amongst the streaming and blockbuster landscape of American film.

Cathy Brennan turns the attention back onto the critics: why do we watch the films we do, and what happens to the films we don’t?

Esmé Holden explores how the precision of Minnelli’s mise-en-scène creates a platonic formula for nostalgia in Meet Me in St. Louis.

Join S Paul as he unspools threads on Justin Bieber, Chicago drill, and theory, in an essay that is both sprawling and tightly interwoven.

Welcome back to Cinema Year Zero. 

Matt Kennedy uses his study of autoethnography to highlight a moment in Kimberly Peirce's 1999 film. 

In her CYZ debut, Esmé Holden locates spirituality within the materialistic world of Max Ophüls’ 1953 masterpiece The Earrings of Madame de…

Want to know what was lit and what was shit at Locarno this year? Then check out Joseph Owens’ report on the Swiss festival.

Kirsty Asher interrogates the politics of 2021 animation Cryptozoo in light of the January 6th Insurrection

What is Denpa? Ellisha Izumi unpacks this familiar yet enigmatic Japanese genre.

Kirsty Asher connects Cold War paranoia to psychogeography via Andrej Żuławski’s classic horror film.

Maximilien Luc Proctor turns the camera on himself to talk about his latest feature film.

Orla Smith on the disastrous indie film that Tobey Maguire convinced Leonardo DiCaprio to disown.

Ren Scateni on the last part of Seijun Suzuki’s Roman Trilogy.

Fedor Tot breaks down Lazar Stojanović’s scathing attack on Yugoslav government.

Alonso Aguilar on one of the last works of Italian Neorealism.

Anna Devereux on Jacqueline Audry’s landmark lesbian film.