Cinema Year Zero

Christmas, again.

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 …”.

Woke Hallmark Movies DESTROYING Christmas

Kelsey Grammer has stolen valour.

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.

I grew up in a pulseless nothing-ville outside a certain Canadian metropolis.

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.

Think of Arnold van Gennep.

“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 film was dead: to begin with.

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.

“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.