Essays

Through the film Wendy and Lucy, precarity can be understood as a state of existential insecurity marked by unstable housing, erosion of occupational identity, loss of benefits and insurance, and a constant risk of falling into debt. Unlike Hollywood’s tendency to personalise conflict, Kelly Reichardt frames the system itself as the true antagonist in Wendy and Lucy. […]

Image 01 In 120 Beats per Minute, activism emerges first in private, intimate spaces before erupting into public confrontation. The frame of a hand drawing fake blood from a tub into a syringe exemplifies this. The image foregrounds the tension in the activist’s veins, visually linking the symbolic blood they prepare to the real blood that

  From the Sierra Maestra peasant whose dignity depends on embracing the revolution, to the bourgeois intellectual who resists it and drifts toward erasure, I Am Cuba and Memories of Underdevelopment trace the revolution’s pulse. While I Am Cuba imagines the revolution’s birth through sweeping representations of collective struggle and the exposure of institutionalized inequalities,

In the landscape of global art cinema, contemporary Japanese film occupies a distinctive position, marked by its meditative pace, aesthetic restraint, and emotional opacity. Since the late 1990s, directors such as Naomi Kawase, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi have emerged as key figures in a movement often associated with slow cinema, a movement associated with

‘In traditional Oriental art… an artist would spend his life perfecting certain brush strokes, painting and repainting the same scene. Ozu was also a perfectionist; he spent his life perfecting a small repertoire of shots, filming and refilming the same story. The end product of a Zen painter’s career could be a single painting; similarly,

The introduction of sound in film was widely celebrated as an advancement or refinement of the medium, yet Rudolf Arnheim, a prominent figure in film theory, held a dissenting viewpoint on the role of sound in cinema. In Arnheim’s theories on film, he contends that sound impeded rather than enriched the artistic possibilities of the

I have opted to delve into German Expressionism through three different sources. My first source is an article discussing the political and ethical ideas of German Expressionists in ‘The German Quarterly’. My second source is a book chapter on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) in German Expressionist Cinema: The World of Light and Shadow, examining

Ingmar Bergman’s films delve into the depths of the human psyche, revealing profound insights into the complexities of existence with haunting precision. While the extensive filmography of Ingmar Bergman offers numerous perspectives for analysis, this essay will focus on two specific book chapters that examine different aspects of his work. The first source illuminates the

North by Northwest (1959) is an adventure film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The film is a rollicking journey, laced with excitement that revolves around the theme of ‘Mistaken Identity’. Script by Ernest Lehman. DP by Robert Burks. Edited by George Tomasini. Music by Bernard Herrmann. Starring Cary Grand, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Leo G. Carroll,