(A 1972 dossier on Douglas Sirk, for example, marked an early attempt at semiotic analysis to elucidate the filmmaker’s ironic departure from the conventions of mainstream illusionistic cinema.) On occasion these same methods would find their way into Afterimage, particularly in its fifth issue, guest-edited by the prolific film theorist and frequent contributor Noël Burch. For Screen, pursuing this question meant recruiting various intellectual frameworks, from structural linguistics to psychoanalysis, into a theoretical mode that tended to focus on classical Hollywood and European art cinema. Other journals would soon contend with similar questions, including the influential Screen, which produced the first translation of the Cahiers manifesto for its spring 1971 issue. However, underlying all of the journal’s investigations was the importance of recovering the “complex and interesting possibilities” of film form that throughout history have been underutilized and undervalued by commercial cinema. One of the twin editorials published in its second issue, for example, favors the technical experimentation of avant-garde cinema, while the other is more concerned with political themes. The first issue of Afterimage makes no explicit reference to the Cahiers manifesto, though its cover-featuring a still from the militant anthology film Cinétracts (1968) and the words “Film and Politics” printed above it-gestures at the same question Comolli and Narboni had attempted to answer: what do we mean when we talk about radical cinema? Throughout its run, Afterimage considered many possible answers.
The year before, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, co-editors of the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma, had published “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” a landmark manifesto inspired by the protests of workers and students that spread throughout France in the spring of 1968. If The Afterimage Reader is a departure from the press’s previous focus on individual director monographs, it offers something equally significant and rare: a selection of writings from the independent English journal Afterimage, representing a cross-section of its unique and inventive approaches to radical cinema.Īfterimage was founded in 1970 by Simon Field and Peter Sainsbury, then recent graduates of the University of Essex. Since 2014, the independent, UK-based Visible Press has released four outstanding titles collecting the otherwise scattered and hard-to-find writings of key figures from the international avant-garde, including American experimental filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos ( Film as Film, 2014), English experimental filmmakers Peter Gidal ( Flare Out, 2016) and Lis Rhodes ( Telling Invents Told, 2019), and maverick American critic-filmmaker Thom Andersen ( Slow Writing, 2017). In light of this, the appearance of The Afterimage Reader, published last May, is very welcome. Yet here in the United States, audiences are more likely to know the films of Kijû Yoshida, Glauber Rocha, and Harun Farocki than the names of the magazines they wrote for. If the 1960s ushered in new approaches to cinema, the decade was no less impactful for film criticism. Sign up for the Letter here.Įdited by Mark Webber, The Visible Press, 2022
IS MOVIE NINJA IO DOWN FREE
This article appeared in the Augedition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sleep well.Ī Nightmare on Elm Street is available for streaming on HBO Max and Netflix. Three girls jumping rope are heard chanting Krueger’s nursery rhyme as Marge is grabbed by Krueger through the front door window.
Nancy gets into Glen’s convertible when the top suddenly comes down and locks them in as the car drives uncontrollably down the street. All her friends and her mother are still alive. Several dead bodies later, Nancy steps outside into a bright and foggy morning. They both reveal they each also had a nightmare the previous night. The next morning, Tina’s best friend Nancy Thompson and her boyfriend, Glen Lantz (Johnny Depp making his debut), console her. Her mother points out four mysterious slashes on her nightgown. In the original movie, teenager Tina Gray wakes from a terrifying nightmare wherein a disfigured man wearing a blade-fixed glove attacks her in a boiler room.
While filming the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Robert Englund had a similar experience after he was transformed into the legendary slasher, thanks to the magic of Robert Kurtzman’s prosthetics.