Volume 19, Issue 3 / March 2015

From Here and There

In this mixed bag of material, this issue features films covering no less than six countries, Italy, Greece, Canada, Iran, United States, and Germany. There is a carry over from last month’s coverage of the Cannes International Film Festival, with Marie-Eve Fortin’s festival report that looks at three films in the official competition by Matteo Garrone, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Denis Villeneuve. My own piece on Alain Vezina’s Le Scaphandrier places the Quebec horror film within the context of Canadian genre history and appreciates the film’s successful blend of the retro with the fresh. While Le Scaphandrier might be pretty unusual as a French language slasher film, Shahram Mokri’s film breaks new ground as Iran’s first ever horror film. Writers Amir Ganjavie and Leila Passandideh interview its young director Shahram Mokri’s, and are particularly interested in the film’s brave emulation of the ‘one take’ aesthetic. Garrett’s review of Stoker is a broad reaching analysis of how the film plays out within the respective careers of its central performers, from director Park Chan-Wook to Nicole Kidman, and also as a mannered study of family, a subject which has been at the heart of two genres which Stoker flirts with, melodrama and horror. To quote Elaine Lennon’s own abstract, her essay is a “production background to and interpretation of the Billy Wilder-authored film A Foreign Affair (1948), a work which conjoins a sardonic view of the American occupying Army’s rapacious behaviour in the post-war city of Berlin with a study of stardom in its casting of two of Hollywood’s most distinctive actresses, Marlene Dietrich and Jean Arthur, in competition for the affections of the same, smooth-talking, double-dealing, black-marketeering US Army Captain (John Lund).” (Donato Totaro, ed.)