Sight & Sound videos

A horror in the breach: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day

Long before she boldly journeyed to the far side of sci-fi with High Life, Claire Denis had already clawed at the inner limits of cinema with her Vincent Gallo-Beatrice Dalle horror foray Trouble Every Day. Jessica McGoff explores Denis’s violation of genre in pursuit of the inexpressible.
Friday 10 May 2019

Blackface, whitewashing and the grey zone – a two-part video inquiry

Who gets to play who on screen – and how? In this two-part video essay, Leigh Singer looks at Hollywood’s shifting but stubborn history of racial blacklisting and white privilege, then turns to the ongoing ambiguities of satire and power and today’s prevailing controversies of cultural elision and appropriation.
Friday 5 April 2019

Three Colours Silver: Europe 25 years after Kieslowski’s trilogy – a video essay

A quarter century on from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s post-Cold War arthouse landmark, how has time distilled the insights of Three Colours Blue, White and Red, asks Leigh Singer.
Wednesday 12 September 2018

Deep focus: The other side of 80s America

Amid the 1980s’ ‘Morning in America’ reckoning, the ‘high concept’ spectacles, cartoonish action and the bottom line, some filmmakers who persisted in making personal, often overlooked films that revealed the other side of Reaganism’s patriotic bluster and hollow optimism. Nick Pinkerton explores the flipside of 1980s American cinema, with a video essay by Sierra Pettengill.
Monday 28 May 2018

Women on a Bergman screen – a video essay

Swedish master Ingmar Bergman’s fascination with female experience and emotions underpinned one of the cinema’s greatest virtual communities of women on screen. In this video study Leigh Singer invites Bergman’s talented actresses and their creations into closest possible correspondence.
Friday 2 February 2018

In her eyes: notes on Gloria Grahame (a video essay)

With a curl of her lip and an arch of her eyebrow, Gloria Grahame was the actress who stood up to both Humphrey Bogart and Lee Marvin in their most violent roles. In this video essay, Serena Bramble explores the burn mark Grahame left on the silver screen.
Friday 24 November 2017

Wrapped in plasticity: Twin Peaks’ myriad Laura Palmers

Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin conduct a forensic examination of the slippages at play in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s surrealistic investigative series.
Friday 28 April 2017

The superhero movies of 2016: brawl without end?

In the year of Batman v Superman v Captain America v Iron Man et al, snarky Deadpool, self-parodying X-Men: Apocalypse and super-grim Suicide Squad, could Doctor Strange show us the door to a better world – or at least a richer class of superhero film? A video essay by Leigh Singer.
Friday 20 January 2017

Video: A tour through French noir

What makes French film noir French? Dive down to the lowest depths with Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s video abstract, charting six key Gallic characteristics of cinema’s most alluringly brooding genre.
Friday 4 November 2016

Hex appeal: how witches charmed the cinema

Witches are not just for Halloween, or for horror movies. Charlotte Richardson Andrews celebrates the screen’s sexier, more sisterly sorceresses: symbols of divine feminine magic and healing rather than bloodthirsty she-devils. With video by Leigh Singer.
Friday 28 October 2016

Kirk Douglas: Hollywood champ

As Kirk Douglas reaches his 100th birthday, we celebrate the dimpled one with a survey of his extraordinary career, plus a video tribute to his host of classic roles playing ruthless villains, morally ambiguous mavericks and self-interested sharks.
Friday 2 September 2016

Video: Haunted memories – the cinema of Víctor Erice

Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López explore the joy and regret of nostalgia with one of the cinema’s great, spare poets of sense-memory.
Friday 2 September 2016

Video: A speck in the cosmos – the inner frontiers of Raoul Walsh’s Pursued

Tag Gallagher offers a psychological reading of Raoul Walsh’s 1947 Robert Mitchum starrer Pursued, perhaps Hollywood’s first psychological western and certainly one of its weirdest.
Monday 9 May 2016

Video: Barbaric poetry – can we really film the Holocaust?

As László Nemes’s award-winning Son of Saul forges a new way of dramatising an Auschwitz-like death camp, Leigh Singer revisits the ethical arguments around the art of the abyss.
Friday 29 April 2016

Video essay: Lines of resistance – Anne-Marie Miéville’s The Book of Mary

Counterpointing Godard: Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin offer a taste of Anne-Marie Miéville’s cinema, and a look at the patterns at play in her prologue to her partner’s Hail Mary.
Friday 26 February 2016

Video essay: Kicking against the chick flicks – reclaiming the Hollywood romcom

Homogenised, segregated and stupefied, the mainstream romantic comedy has never been less sexy. Leigh Singer on how to get its freak back on.
Friday 18 December 2015

Video: Southern Gothic

What makes for Southern Gothic? Robert Greene can tell you some tales…
Friday 10 April 2015

What was documentary? An elegy for Robert Gardner

Is it time to put away this mirage of ‘nonfiction’ cinema, asks Kevin B. Lee?
Thursday 28 August 2014

Video: the art of nonfiction

Robert Greene essays a love letter to the “magical imitation of reality”.
Thursday 7 August 2014

Dear John Grierson: A Postscript to The Story of Film (rough cut)

All aboard the good train cinephilia, as Mark Cousins conducts us to lesser-visited stations around the documentary globe.
Friday 1 August 2014

The long conversation: Richard Linklater on cinema and time

kogonada looks time in the eye with the maker of Before Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight.
Monday 4 November 2013

Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent

In a world bedazzled by intractable images, do we need the essay film now more than ever? Kevin B. Lee weighs up this distinctively self-aware, searching form of cinema through both video and text.
Tuesday 16 July 2013

Video: The world according to Koreeda

kogonada on how Japan’s modern master revives our taste for everyday life.
Friday 8 February 2013

Video essay: The animal menagerie of Rhythm and Hues

Kevin B. Lee considers the digital circus mastery of Hollywood’s leading computer-generated-animal engineers.
Friday 21 December 2012

Video: Steadicam progress – the career of Paul Thomas Anderson in five shots

Tracking a journey of camera journeys from Hard Eight to There Will Be Blood, Kevin B. Lee wonders if the director has put away showy things.
Friday 16 November 2012

Deptford Cinema: one for all!

In the first of our video reports about new London cinemas, Edward Lawrenson speaks to Deptford Cinema’s Edwin Mingard about volunteer-run exhibition in the high-rent city, and the virtues of community-led programming.
Friday 17 July 2015

Celluloid haven: Close Up Cinema

In the second of our video reports about London’s 2015 batch of cinema initiatives, Edward Lawrenson sees and hears a valorous defence of celluloid film projection from Close Up Cinema’s Damien Sanville.
Friday 17 July 2015

Building a small cinema in Liverpool

Anthony Killick embeds himself with a crack troupe of volunteer cinema refitters remaking a former Liverpool magistrates court as a cooperative picturehouse.
Friday 17 July 2015

Expanding your world: Bertha DocHouse in the Curzon Bloomsbury

In the third of our video reports about London’s 2015 batch of cinema initiatives, Edward Lawrenson prowls a Tarkovsky-inspired renovation of the former Curzon Renoir, where he finds DocHouse director Elizabeth Wood explaining her ambitions for a dedicated space to host the best of documentary cinema.
Thursday 5 November 2015

Access: Sheffield Doc/Fest

How to be a documentary filmmaker in the UK? It’s all about what hotel bar you know, video-essays Charlie Lyne.
Monday 9 July 2018

Now go wash: True/False 2014 and the Unclean Cinema

Art / journalism, ethics / aesthetics, chaos / structure, creativity / confusion: documentaries are embracing their inner slash, reports Robert Greene.
Saturday 22 March 2014

Funner than fiction: True/False 2013

Kevin B. Lee visits the festival where documentary filmmakers and fans let down their hair.
Thursday 28 March 2013

Video: Five finds at the 2013 Rotterdam International Film Festival

Five film watchers with two hats apiece go gold-panning at the mouth of the Rhine.
Friday 8 February 2013

Video: Three closings and four highlights – the Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012

Despite power cuts and further official interference, the ninth Beijing Independent Film Festival managed to showcase some remarkable new movies, finds Kevin B. Lee.
Thursday 30 August 2012

Portraits of young women on fire: Céline Sciamma on female art, identity and intimacy

What sparks fly when the female gaze grows intimate? Céline Sciamma talks us through her portraits of girlhood and womanhood, culminating in the the heat and light of her Portrait of a Lady on Fire, in this video essay by Leigh Singer.
Friday 28 February 2020

Argento on Suspiria – a video inquiry

The master of giallo looks back on his horror masterpiece at 40 in this celebratory video interview by Leigh Singer.
Friday 12 January 2018

“Once upon a pair of wheels”… Edgar Wright on Baby Driver and the classic car movies

Rev your headphones for Edgar Wright’s tribute to the neorealist canon of burning rubber thrillers that emerged from the New Hollywood in the late 1960s and 70s, and inspired his musical heist movie Baby Driver, in this video interview by Leigh Singer.
Wednesday 28 June 2017

Clio Barnard on her Wellcome Trust and BFI Screenwriting Fellowship

What the Selfish Giant director did with her year-long residency.
Friday 30 January 2015