Liberty, guilt and morality in The Battle of Algiers

Watching Michael Haneke’s Hidden / Cache (2005), a film that deftly probes the guilt of France’s bloody colonial past, I was reminded of the power of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece The Battle of Algiers.  The film portrays the brutal real-life struggle for liberty between the French colonial government and the indigenous Algerian National Liberation Front (FNL) that raged in the capital city of French Algeria between 1954 and 1962 when Algeria won independence.

Seduction, sensationalism and the Femme Fatale in American Film Noir

Film Noir is often regarded as a quintessentially American genre defined by enduring Hollywood classics such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Murder My Sweet  and Double Indemnity and the glamorous stars they created. Characterised by sharp, unembellished dialogue and punctuated with slang and sexual innuendo, the genre eschewed the constraints of respectable literary sources and instead took inspiration from the disreputable popular crime fiction of the day.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Delusion and Distortion in 1920s Germany

The 1920 silent horror classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, embodies many of the artistic achievements of the golden age of German Expressionist cinema. At the heart of this short-lived movement was a sense of the importance of conveying emotion and subjective psychological states rather than objective reality. Influenced by psychology, the earliest filmmakers used the new medium of cinema as a visual expression of the mind, designed to mirror the discontinuity and disorder of the individual thought process. It is this rejection of psychological realism that lends the films of this period such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu (1922) and The Golem (1920) a surreal, dreamlike quality. In the 1920s, distortion, asymmetry and non-linear narratives became the hallmark of German Expressionist cinema.