Writer. Editor. Film Scholar. Script Consultant
The delirious adventures of a queer criminal as seen by Yukio Mishima and Kinji Fukasaku screens at the Etrange Festival in Paris on 13 September 2017. Footsteps echo in the dark. A hand knocks on a door. A flap is lifted, a pair of eyes peeks out, the door opens. Footsteps lead down a corridor... Continue Reading →
Against the depressing backdrop of a French cinema determined to be as glossy and brain-dead as Hollywood, 13 (Tzameti), the 2006 first feature by young French-educated Georgian director Gela Babluani, still stands out two years later as one of the most exciting lo-fi black and white Gallic debuts since Luc Besson’s Le dernier combat. In... Continue Reading →
Despite being one of the most accomplished, intelligent and adventurous filmmakers to come out of Japan in recent years, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has inexplicably been ignored in this country. With the overrated Ring spawning a seemingly unquenchable thirst for anything that more or less fitted the ‘J-horror’ label, it looked like Kurosawa came to maturity just... Continue Reading →
Too often put in the same bag as the cynical, Hollywood-engineered wave of blaxploitation flicks it influenced, Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is pure, unadulterated ghetto anger that burns as fiercely now as when it was made over thirty years ago. Having started a filmmaking career in France with the support of Henri... Continue Reading →
‘Maybe an asshole but a filmmaker’. That’s how Melvin Van Peebles, the legendary maverick whose revolutionary 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song sparked Hollywood’s blaxploitation fever, describes himself. His actor and director son, sat next to him, exuding the same effortless cool, does not disagree, in spite of all the respect and esteem he evidently... Continue Reading →
On April 13th the BFI Southbank in London was packed with a motley crowd of Jodorowsky enthusiasts, from old-timers to young hipsters, from red-haired eccentrics to scruffy types in seventies cords. The Chilean-born director had travelled from Paris, where he now lives, on the occasion of the re-release of his legendary seventies films El Topo... Continue Reading →
My Ph.D. thesis, completed at King's College, London, in 2003 (unpublished), focuses on Hollis Frampton, a central figure of the practice of film that has variously been referred to as “experimental”, “underground” and “avant-garde”. This thesis attempts to demonstrate the coherence of Frampton’s ambitious project of constituting a tradition of film. It is a detailed... Continue Reading →
Virginie Sélavy 