vol. 5, issue 3: hot Archives - cléo

Editors’ Note: Hot

cléo journal — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 13:30:38 +0000

From sweaty summer flicks and steamy sex scenes to fictional characters boiling with rage and real footage of our melting world (there’s a reason we’re releasing the HOT issue in December), filmmakers love to get audiences hot and bothered. But we also can’t ignore the fact that we’re living in a moment of hot, […]

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A Conversation on Summer 1993 with Director Carla Simón

clara miranda scherffig — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 13:29:35 +0000

Season of sun, idle days and backless dresses, summer is a period of carnival, rebellion and vacation where time and space are turned upside-down, offering unique opportunities to experiment and develop. As such, summer provides an ideal backdrop for coming-of-age films like Summer 1993 (originally titled Estiu 1993), the first feature-length film by Carla Simón, […]

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Soft, Scrappy Survivors: Kedi’s Melancholic Ode to the Street Cats of Istanbul

ké kampeas-rittenhouse — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 13:27:50 +0000

“Everything is beautiful when you look at it with love.” The statement comes a third of the way into Kedi—Ceyda Torun’s 2016 documentary about Istanbul street cats—as an older man describes a mindful, open-hearted approach to life: seek happiness in small things (a cat, a flower) and “all the world will be yours.” This philosophy […]

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Everyday Untidy Love: Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist and Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow

Elise Moore — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 13:26:49 +0000

Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist is an extraordinarily unconventional film, especially for its 1953 release. While contemporary audiences were not averse to depictions of discontentment with the lifestyle and roles that were supposed to be fulfilling them, mainstream Hollywood films had their own way of conducting this kind of critique. This was not the way of […]

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Barbra Streisand: Cinema of Attraction

Chelsea Phillips Carr — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 13:25:37 +0000

Barbra Streisand’s third directorial outing, The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), thought of as a typical, self-indulgent romantic comedy, was not received favourably. A loose remake of the 1959 French film of the same name by André Cayette, Streisand’s version concerns the romance of a frumpy professor (played by the director herself) and her metamorphosis […]

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Discourses of Desire in Claire Denis’ Vendredi soir

kiva reardon — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 13:24:27 +0000

Claire Denis’ latest film Let the Sunshine In, which follows the failed attempts at finding love by a middle-aged woman (tour de force Juliette Binoche), has been dubbed the “most empathic, heartfelt film of [Denis’] illustrious career.”[i] On account of its more tender subject matter, it’s also being hailed by some as a departure for […]

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“Discover the flavour of things denied to you…”: Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure

Sarah Fonseca — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 13:22:40 +0000

“The song of the Sirens, Cobera, does not exist; the music that cannot be escaped is in their voice alone.” – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Professor and the Siren Before the playwright and biographer Joan Schenkar penned the foremost texts on Dolly Wilde and Patricia Highsmith, she’d already written about another queer figure of literary merit: […]

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“I keep you out of male fantasy”: Peggy Ahwesh and The Deadman

Hyunjee Nicole Kim — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 13:20:37 +0000

The filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh recalled the summer of 1983, which she spent in Pittsburgh, as “a very hot summer.”[i] Indeed, temperatures reached almost 100°F in a city known for seasonal climates both steamy and sticky. That year Ahwesh would develop her Pittsburgh Trilogy (Verite Opera, Paranormal Intelligence, and Nostalgia for Paradise), tying her filmic identity […]

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In (visual) conversation with Ester Martin Bergsmark

amanda barbour — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 13:18:13 +0000

Ester Martin Bergsmark is a genderqueer filmmaker from Stockholm. Their award-winning work (Maggie in Wonderland [2008], She Male Snails [2012], Something Must Break [2014]) is easy to identify due to Bergsmark’s striking visual style, but hard to categorize: documentary, porn, fiction, all, none? As Bergsmark’s identity is articulated through their work, the genre-defying nature […]

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vol. 5, issue 3: hot

kiva reardon — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 13:16:35 +0000

“Winter is coming.” Before it was a harbinger of dark times on HBO’s Game of Thrones, this expression had been a favourite of Northern hemisphere dwellers whenever the first crisp breeze of September rolled in. In anticipation of the colder months to come (and for our 15th issue!), we at cléo decided to end the year with a topic […]

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