Writer. Editor. Film Scholar. Script Consultant
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 →
An austere film, and a hard watch in some respects, Belá Tarr’s The Turin Horse is also extremely rewarding. The film is an oblique take on an anecdote about Nietzsche, which recounts how the philosopher protested at a man who was beating his horse in Turin. The story has inspired many interpretations; Tarr chooses to... Continue Reading →
The work of director Joseph L. Mankiewicz may at first appear wildly disparate, ranging as it does from a ghost story (The Ghost and Mrs Muir, 1947), to a satire of the show-business world (All about Eve, 1950), a Shakespeare adaptation (Julius Caesar, 1953), a four-hour historical epic (Cleopatra, 1963), a murder mystery (The Honey... Continue Reading →
The history of cinema is littered with unfinished grand projects by megalomaniac directors including Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Erich von Stroheim. That Henri-Georges Clouzot should be added to this list seems, at first, surprising. One of France’s greatest directors, he established his reputation with tight, economical, superbly crafted crime thrillers throughout the 40s and... Continue Reading →
I commissioned and edited a collection of essays looking at the theme of 'the end' in cinema, in words and images, and from an extensive range of angles, the unfinished, the decaying, the apocalyptic, the undead, the historical, the end as fate and the end as denouement. From the gutter to the avant garde, The... Continue Reading →
Virginie Sélavy 