In English

IN ENGLISH. How do contemporary television distribution methods and consumption practices influence TV comedies? How are texts, production routines and ways of engaging the audience reshaped? Critically acclaimed TV series Master of None (2016-) and Atlanta (2016-) are good examples of such deep tranformations, leading to a reinvention of the comedy genre.

VIDEO-ESSAY. Having won the Palme d’Or in 2017, it is no surprise that Ruben Östlund draws from other prizewinning directors like Michael Haneke and Roy Andersson. But you wouldn’t expect a Palme d’Or-winning director to find stylistic inspiration in skiing films and on YouTube. Mathias Bonde Korsgaard traces the unlikely origins of Östlund’s long-take style.

IN ENGLISH. Even before its release Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius (2016) became the centre of heated and public debate in Brazil, not least due to a protest at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival condemning the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. In this feature, Steffen Hven explores how the film’s own conveyance of (political) resistance is far more subtle, mature, and nuanced than the turmoil surrounding its release would suggest.

FEATURE. The showrunner David Simon was a central flagship for HBO, when they revolutionized the TV-landscape in the beginning of the 2000s, and even in the highly competitive streaming landscape of today he continues to create relevant drama series that often utilize the past to comment on the present. In this interview, Simon talkes about his approach to realism and long-form storytelling and his views on the changes in American society and the American TV landscape.

FEATURE. Paths of Glory (1957) is one of the best anti-war films ever made as well as Stanley Kubrick’s first masterpiece. It also contains one of the most highly praised film endings. Drawing on a particular form of complementarity, non-doing/doing, Richard Raskin sheds new light on this classic ending.

FEATURE. John Ford is commonly labelled as a ‘visual’ director who was careless about dialogue, even disdainful. However, Ford was not so much careless about words as concerned that they should be trimmed down, and earn their place. Here, Charles Barr argues that names, and acts of naming, are a central thread in his work. Ford is the master not just of the Western, but of the vocative case.

There are many more features, reviews, and anatomies in English in our extensive archive covering the period 2003-2013.

169 SECONDS. In this installment of our jubilee series of 169 Seconds, Catherine Grant collects mirror and reflection sequences from the 2017 Chilean film Una mujer fantástica and ponders their significance in this narrative of queer melancholia and mourning. The film stars Daniela Vega, a trans actress and mezzo-soprano, who, in the closing moments of the film, sings the song that accompanies the essay: “Ombra mai fu”, the opening aria from Händel’s 1738 opera Serse.

169 SECONDS. In Sebastian Lelios The Wonder from 2022 the initial camera movement quite literally takes us from the film studio where the film is shot and into the world of the English nurse Elizabeth Wright in 18th century Ireland. Do you wonder how?