Writer. Film Scholar. Journalist. Editor.
I contributed a video essay on We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne), the spectacular debut by Mexican director Emiliano Rocha Minter. This hallucinatory tale of rituals and rebirth, libidinous excess and transformative violence creates its own Theatre of Cruelty, in direct line with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Antonin Artaud. In the spirit of its illustrious... Continue Reading →
Mixing exploitation with politics and formal experimentation, the Female Prisoner Scorpion series created a mythical female avenger that fired off the imagination of 1970s Japanese audiences. It sparked numerous sequels, although none ever came close to the original three films, directed by Shunya Itô and starring Meiko Kaji. Adapted from Tôru Shinohara’s violent manga, it... Continue Reading →
Ever since the image of a woman’s eyeball being sliced with a razor was dreamt up by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, a whole renegade strand of cinema has delighted in brutally assaulting its audience, violently forcing it to face the gory nature of the body and the mulchy depths of the psyche. The cinematic... Continue Reading →
Lucile Hadžihalilovic explains how she created her oneiric exploration of birth and matter in an elusive, disquieting female world. Evolution, Lucile Hadžihalilovic’s masterful follow-up to her 2004 debut Innocence revolves around a little boy living on an island peopled only by women and other young boys. After a disturbing discovery while swimming in the sea,... Continue Reading →
French medical schools are notorious for the humiliating hazing rituals that new students have to endure, and that tradition is the framework for young writer-director Julia Ducournau’s cannibalistic rites-of-passage tale. In the self-contained space of a vet school, older students subject new arrivals to cruel games, forcing them to eat raw rabbits’ livers or crawl... Continue Reading →
Swedish-born, Barcelona-based erotic filmmaker Erika Lust has been challenging the tiresome clichés and uninventive formulas of the porn industry since her 2004 debut, The Good Girl. Following a string of award-winning features including Life Love Lust and Cabaret Desire, she started the interactive web-based XConfessions project: members of the public are encouraged to confess their... Continue Reading →
This article contains spoilers. I recently answered a few questions about Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) on Radio 4’s Today programme on the occasion of the film’s re-release in cinemas. Set in a circus, Freaks tells of the love of midget Hans for beautiful trapeze artist Cleopatra, and the revenge of the other deformed performers when... Continue Reading →
An unholy hybrid of Otto Preminger’s Laura and Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack!, Nikos Nikolaïdis’s delirious Greek-tragedy-inflected sado-masochistic comedy noir Singapore Sling is one of those wondrous alien objects that excitingly tear through the cinematographic sky once in a while. It remains the most famous of Nikolaïdis’s films outside of Greece, even though he made eight theatrical... Continue Reading →
Peter Whitehead is best known for documenting the landmark events in the rise and fall of the counterculture throughout the 1960s, from the Beat poetry reading at the Royal Albert Hall in Wholly Communion, to the explosion of the myth of Swinging London in Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. But at the end... Continue Reading →
In our age of information overload, it is rare to stumble upon a truly unknown artistic movement, so the rediscovery of the 3rd Eye Group, the only 1970s Israeli counter-cultural movement, is all the more exciting. Founded and led by maverick artist and filmmaker Jacques Katmor, it shook up Israeli society for a few short... Continue Reading →
Virginie Sélavy 