Ruairi McCann

Belfast

Editor at Ultra Dogme

Editor: @ultradogme Contributor: a few places e.g. @photogenie_be @NotebookMubi Music: @2nicecathboys [email protected]

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Articles

The Foibles of Homo Faber: on Frederick Wiseman's Primate

1 month ago | ruairimccann.substack.com | Ruairi McCann

In the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, genre is often the football to his Lucy, imbuing his work with a set of received notions which he then methodically dismantles and then builds on. In Meat (1976), for example, the opening shot of a man on a horse cresting a ridge, a dramatic image straight out of a Frederic Remington painting, swiftly and emphatically establishes the popular vision of the west as a mythic playground of rugged individualists. This is then stripped away.
Ruairí’s Substack

1 month ago | ruairimccann.substack.com | Ruairi McCann

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Frederick Wiseman Goes to War

2 months ago | mubi.com | Ruairi McCann

Like religion, the military is a consistent presence in the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, which have charted a staggering range of institutions and communities in a distinct observational mode. His continual interest in this subject across six decades of films is also an acknowledgement of the military’s constant influence on American life, either overtly or as the elephant in the room.
Singing And Dying Is What We Are Born For: An Interview With RÓIS

Oct 9, 2024 | thethinair.net | Ruairi McCann

Song as a fundamental part of the human experience, a force both profoundly quotidian and supernatural, sits at the heart of RÓIS’ new release MO LÉAN. Its guiding theme is that of death and grief and their expression through music, inspired by forms that served an exalted purpose for generations and generations of Irish people. Caoineadh or keening is a form of vocal lament that existed in Gaelic society since antiquity and only ceased as a living rite at the turn of the 20th century.
Hiroshi Shimizu’s Floating Worlds

May 22, 2024 | mubi.com | Ruairi McCann

In 1924, Hiroshi Shimizu, the 21-year-old son of a wealthy businessman, dropped his studies at an agricultural school in Hokkaido and moved to Tokyo to pursue his interest in filmmaking. The Japanese industry was in a state of flux, moving away from the jidaigeki, or period dramas, and towards gendaigeki, films about contemporary life: slapstick, romantic, and sport-themed comedies; crime films; and its trademark, shōshimin-eiga, social dramas concerned with working and middle class life.
The Animal Side: Interview with Katherine Waugh & Fergus Daly

May 22, 2024 | sensesofcinema.com | Ruairi McCann

I See a Darkness (2023) delves into the shadow archive of image-capture technologies, and, with an emphasis on the non-human and animal, raises questions about the streamlining of cinematographic technologies in the 20th century by scientific rationality.
Living And Looking In The Manner of Smoke: On Cameron Worden's You're Dancing This Dance All Wrong (2023)

May 1, 2024 | ruairimccann.substack.com | Ruairi McCann

The late Richard Serra once posited that a central concern of his work in sculpture and drawing is to present looking as a creative act. It’s a socially informed one too, in that you don’t look at the world around you in the same way if you live on the street versus if you’re one of those frictionless, bubble-wrapped people who make six, seven or eight figures a year and glide through life accordingly.
Reviews

Apr 30, 2024 | bfmaf.org | Nicolas Helm-Grovas |Ruairi McCann |WJ Quinn

Take a look at some of the coverage of the 19th Berwick Film & Media Arts festival available to read for free online:Slant Magazineby David Robb“Whether directly related to the conflict or not, reversals, recurrence, and the limits of representation are preoccupations of Al-Sharif’s work.
Instruments of Liberation: Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival 2024

Apr 26, 2024 | documentary.org | Ruairi McCann

The question of how to build a more open and equitable film festival is an old and still pressing concern. Ideally, there will be a plurality of answers and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival may be one of them. Its 2024 edition, which ran 7–10 March, felt like a festival whose program was not only deeply engaged with larger political struggles, but also open and malleable in a way that many festivals claim but rarely enact in the relations underpinning the screenings.
The Fruits of Our Labour: An Interview with Tulapop Saenjaroen

Feb 20, 2024 | ruairimccann.substack.com | Ruairi McCann

The cinema of Tulapop Saenjaroen changes shape unpredictably, film to film, and yet what running constant through all these speculations, play and collisions are the entwined concepts of work and play. For nearly two decades, Saenjaroen has probed the parasitical relationship that frequently exists between these concepts, which has festered under capitalism and accelerated in recent decades.