Cinema Year Zero: Recent Episodes
Cinema Year Zero
Ben Flanagan braves Ken Russell's Uri Geller biopic to find just how bad things can get for a great filmmaker.
Shelby Cooke worships at the Altar of Marilyn Monroe and the Church of the Pinball Wizard
Blaise Radley on Therese Henningsen's film. Driven by a recurring urge to encounter strangers with her camera, the filmmaker begins to film her solitary Greek Cypriot neighbour Pete in the tower block in North London where they both live.
Caught the personal documentary fever but don’t know where to go next? Luckily for you, Cinema Year Zero has assembled a list of ten further films from throughout the short but vibrant history of the genre.
Kirsty Asher looks at Chloe Abrahams' cinematic love letter spanning time and generations, which probes at raw questions her mother and grandmother have long brushed aside, untangling painful knots in her family’s unspoken past.
Tom de Lancy Green on Shared Resources, which depicts Jordan Lord’s family after their father was fired from his job as a debt collector and their parents declared bankruptcy, largely due to the filmmaker’s student debt.
Ben Flanagan on Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, The first feature-length film by Julian Castronovo. It follows a young filmmaker named Julian Castronovo who discovers a trail of clues related to the disappearance of a skilled art forger known as Fawn Ma.
Arta Barzanji on Azza El-Hassan's documentary about the films in the PLO Media Unit. These were supposed to show a self-determined image of Palestinian reality – and they went missing during the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. In a road movie from Palestine to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, director El-Hassan follows the contradicting and confusing clues as to the whereabouts of the lost archive.
Emily Jisoo Bowles discusses Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Audrey project, an ongoing series of films made in collaboration with actor Deragh Campbell. Together, Bohdanowicz and Campbell have created the character of Audrey as an amalgamation of themselves, exploring different facets of Bohdanowicz’s personal life and research through her conduit persona.
Four programmers on their online video that showcases the stories Britain tells about itself through the internet. From vlogs to memes to uncategorisable curiosities, these videos might not have initially been intended as ‘cinema’, but what is cinema if not images and narratives that are so iconic that they stick in our heads?
Orla Smith speaks with Joe Bini about his attempt to cross the experience of reading a book with the experience of watching a film.
Orla Smith finds kinship between Ken Russell and the films of Caveh Zahedi.
On 23rd July, join us at The Cinema Museum for a rare screening of Crimes of Passion on 16mm, where print copies of the issue will be exclusively available. Tickets are now on sale via our website.
Carmen Paddock on the composer as superhero – and supervillain.
On 23rd July, join us at The Cinema Museum for a rare screening of Crimes of Passion on 16mm, where print copies of the issue will be exclusively available. Tickets are now on sale via our website.
Cinema Year Zero is excited to announce Volume 20: Ken Russell’s History of the World, a 7-essay retrospective of the untamable British director.
On 23rd July, join us at The Cinema Museum for a rare screening of Crimes of Passion on 16mm, where print copies of the issue will be exclusively available. Tickets are now on sale here.
The event is presented in collaboration with film club and contributor Siren Screen, who have chosen a feature and short film both exploring the Madonna-Whore myth and the surreal world of bedroom fantasies.
But first, please enjoy the issue intro, penned by Cinema Year Zero Associate Editor, Kirsty Asher.
Earlier this autumn, long before the pitch call for this Christmas edition of CYZ landed in my inbox, while absentmindedly scrolling through TikTok I came across a video by user @livgrace_x with the caption “If you live in liverpool.. wait for the end …”.
In 2004, a movie was released about the joyous reclamation of youthful romance through time travel, and the rejection of hard-bitten corporate life in favour of downhome suburban bliss.
It’s a cold winter’s night in the UK, and the dazzling floodlights of AFC Newbourne’s home ground are visible for miles in every direction across the London skyline, each dappled beam only matched in reach by the echoing caterwauls of the staunchly loyal blues fans.
Something unspoken lies underneath the whole of cinephilia. Well, not exactly unspoken.
For the estimable cineastes confused by last year’s dispatch, may I state for the record: I love the Locarno Film Festival.
Swashbuckling action, scoundrelly antics, and even tattered iconography are all mere ornaments of what the act of piracy actually entails.
If you access Brown Sugar Too Bitter For Me (2013) via Guyanese director Mahadeo Shivraj’s official YouTube account, the first image that appears is a message in white on a black background: “Piracy is not a victimless crime”.
The camera trembles ever so slightly, the unseen cameraperson weary of its illicit recording.
2012’s Trouble With The Curve opens on a then-83 year-old Clint Eastwood in dialogue with his penis, attempting to coax pee out by berating it with gruff, raspy words.
Detective John Anderton spends his days in the future, solving murders that haven’t happened yet.
During each presentation at the fourth and latest edition of New York’s Prismatic Ground film festival, which focuses on experimental and documentary cinema, the founder and organiser, Inney Prakash, made it a point to note that the genocide of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli, British, and American governments was ongoing.
“I shot the movie in 1993,” rasps the unseen director George Sluizer with a Herzog-like Germanic twang, his haggard voice emanating from the screen as it zooms slowly in on a still photograph: Sluizer’s arm is linked casually, almost absent-mindedly, with that of his star River Phoenix, who looks off into the distance (it is unclear whether he knows the camera is there). They are shooting Dark Blood (2012), a morose neo-Western whose production would be forever halted by Phoenix’s sudden and tragic overdose outside a nightclub in West Hollywood.
The method of cinema invokes the ghost of reality rather than reanimating it, the technology itself the vessel through which the ghost is projected to the seeing eye.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Cathy Brennan discusses the feminine undertones to Shakespeare’s most iconic protagonist.
Joseph Owen finds the link between a Cannes competition player and the most infamous of all pre-Code films.
Ioanna Micha connects the bizarre dots between the 2017 animated film and the Shirley-Temple starring 1930s Baby Burlesks.
Ruairí McCann studies a William A. Wellman feature publicised as being "Not for Children".
Cathy Brennan on the double-edged sword of Marlene Dietrich and Josef Von Sternberg's collaborations.
Tom Atkinson on Katharine Hepburn's transition from pre-Code to Code-era matrimonial narratives.
Cathy Brennan asserts just how it was that Toby Young and Julie Burchill lost friends and alienated people.
Fedor Tot investigates why Fritz Lang's moral ambiguity influenced so many, but could be skilfully deployed by so few.
Ben Flanagan breaks down Fritz Lang's Abbey Road: the large-scale political quagmire of the two-part film The Indian Epic.
Tom Atkinson finds the Lang in one of the German auteur's most prolific spiritual descendants: Johnnie To.
Patrick Preziosi finds Lang's immediate influence in two 1950s Columbia noir films: Don Siegel's The Lineup and Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper.
Joseph Owen finds only despair and prison anxiety in the works of William Faulkner and serial killer thriller M.
Katie Hogan asks whether the woman-as-robot character in fiction can only be in the image of the Maria-bot in Metropolis.
Cathy Brennan finds that Dr Mabuse and The Wolf of Wall Street's Jordan Belfort have a lot in common.
Serena Scateni pulls out the imperialist practices afoot in Lang's 1919 Madame Butterfly adaptation, Harakiri.
Ben Flanagan makes the case for Orson Welles' long-lost masterpiece The Other Side of the Wind is a hybrid documentary on the death of a genius.
Satya Harihan draws a line across history from 1980s British police violence in Black Audio Film Collective's Handsworth Songs to our present moment of image saturation.
Joseph Owen examines the power of knowledge and perception in Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North.
The public perception of a dead woman is challenged in Carol Morley's Dreams of a Life, as Orla Smith writes.
Cathy Brennan documents her fragmented thoughts and frustrations working her way through the filmography of corrupt YouTube auteur Shane Dawson.
Two new festival hits - Me and the Cult Leader and The Viewing Booth - are investigated by Cat Mahmoud for what they can teach us about how we receive and regurgitate images.
Maximilien Luc Proctor finds valuable documentary insight in the experimental films of Nathaniel Dorsky, Teo Hernandez, and James Benning.
Thomas Atkinson surveys the digital documentary future promised by Isiah Medina's Inventing the Future, and says: 'Is this it?'
Amos Levin discusses his curated online season of African revolutionary cinema, Glory and Dignity.
Cathy Brennan uses Patricio Guzman's The Cordillera of Dreams to question the romantic myth of film festivals.
Thomas Atkinson untangles 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and its flurry of digital video.
Ben Flanagan connects the dots between a 1930s thriller and two present-day genre pieces on white supremacy.