Death in Venice turns fifty in 2021. The moment of the pandemic may be one reason to look back at this film about cholera in Italy. The release of the documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (2021), about Bjorn Andrésen who starred as Tadzio, is another. But what is most enduring is Visconti’s engagement with the family, and above all with the mother. This calls for reflection in the present moment when maternal eroticism and its relation to maternal subjectivity are newly illuminated in feminist writing. Through extended analysis of Silvana Mangano’s presence in the film, her wardrobe, and her gestures, this article argues that Visconti opens a space for feelings of heartbreak, love for the mother, and grief at her desire. In its vision of madness in the family, beyond its images of cholera in Venice, this is a pandemic film unafraid to look into the vortex.

Now at the acme of her slow-burn career—she turned 72 last year—Claire Denis is producing work that is superlative. Her newest works conjure feelings of an unrivalled intensity and tenderness. This article considers her English-language sci-fi film High Life (2018) and her French rom-com Un Beau Soleil Intérieur [ Let the Sunshine In ] (2017) in parallel, arguing that the two films converge as forceful meditations on love and death. In the world of Denis, tenderness characterizes the gentlest, most delicate feelings, but is also about vulnerability, a sensitivity to pain. Denis brings these qualities into relief as she contemplates death and a finite future through these two stories of a female artist exploring relationships and of convict passengers on a space ship. Through the roles of actress Juliette Binoche in each film, Denis takes a feminist stance on ageing and sexuality, as she also looks openly at other human feelings.

Gianfranco Rosi's Fuocoammare ( Fire at Sea , 2016), won the Golden Bear at the 2016 Berlinale, was shown to the European parliament, distributed to heads of state by Matteo Renzi, and has become the contemporary film most closely associated with the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. This article considers the film alongside Rosi's earlier film about Slab City, California, Below Sea Level (2008), previously little seen in the US. Wilson argues that Rosi is more than a filmmaker of the migrant tragedy in Europe, radically important though his vision is of this moment. With and beyond Fuocoammare , all his films look at extreme experiences of living and dying. Inspired by the work of philosopher and psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle on secrecy, love, tenderness and risk, Wilson considers how Rosi's films achieve a closeness to their characters: a sensory and emotional immediacy, whilst refusing voyeurism and intrusion.

Céline Sciamma as writer and director is peculiarly attentive to sensory detail, what things feel like, how they can be touched. This attention can be felt through her collaborative work with director of photography Crystel Fournier, who has worked on all of Sciamma's films to date in a creative collaboration proving just as electric as that between Claire Denis and Agnès Godard. Reflecting on her work to date, linking Girlhood to the earlier films, Didier Péron and Elisabeth Franck-Dumas wrote in Libération that Sciamma makes real the body and emotions of individuals in all their singularity. Intimacy is her real subject in Girlhood . The particular issue in relation to intimacy Sciamma pursues, from Water Lilies on, is that of hurt. She is a filmmaker who in her bodily, affective filmmaking has paid attention to hurt, to abrasion, and to vulnerability; she makes them all part of the robust, adrenaline-pumped feminist politics that pervade her films and their characters. It is this mode of making real—this feeling alive—that Wilson explores in this essay.

Armenian Canadian director Atom Egoyan's recent films, Adoration (2006) and Chloe (2009), and his art installations, pursue and complicate his career-long interest in technology and its intersections with desire and fantasy. In an interview with Emma Wilson, Egoyan discusses these works and reflects more broadly on filmmaking in the digital age.

This essay situates Cristian Mungiu's film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in relation to a number of films which deal with abortion. However, the argument is made that this film's chief concern is for problems of intimacy and distress pertaining to the central friendship between two women.

ABSTRACT Though the two films seem rather different——Bruno Dumont's Flanders dealing with an imaginary contemporary war, Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory concerned with forgotten incidents in World War II——the argument of this essay is that they share a sense, somewhat unusual among recent French filmmakers, of the political power of cinema.

ABSTRACT Following Under the Sand (2000), Franççois Ozon's Time to Leave (2005) is the second film in a proposed trilogy about mourning. This essay explores the film's meditation on a dying gay photographer's last days, discussing how it seems to blur the distinctions between dream and reality, memory and fantasy, love and trauma.