About CineMadison

CineMadison is a Madison-oriented film blog written by Dan Sullivan, a 21-year-old senior history(/herstory) major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was born in New York City in 1988 under somewhat suspicious circumstances, and then spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Princeton, NJ.

Dan has devoted and continues to devote much too much of his life to cinema, and he doesn’t doubt for a second that the sheer amount of time he’s spent surrounded by total strangers in dark rooms has had a significant impact on the present constitution of his psyche. He’s the senior film critic for a student newspaper in Madison, the Daily Cardinal, and, more recently, a freelance reporter covering film-related phenomena for a local weekly, Isthmus.

Dan’s primary interests include: avant-garde/experimental cinema; the work of Jean-Luc Godard (real original, he knows), Chantal Akerman, Philippe Garrel, Jacques Rivette, Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, Robert Bresson and many, many other directors; films about art and artists; film theory and its various intersections with continental philosophy; film criticism (well duh); and the countless affinities between cinema and those other arts (painting, architecture and literature in particular).

And yes, CineMadison’s banner does indeed feature an image from Godard’s “Ici et ailleurs” (1976).

Dan gets asked what his all-time favorite films are all the time, so here’s 11 of ’em (restricted to one film per director in an effort to conceal his favoritism):

1. The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973)

2. Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988-1998)

3. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

4. Not Reconciled, or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules (Jean-Marie Straub, 1965)

5. Out 1 (Jacques Rivette, 1971)

6. Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)

7. Earth (Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930)

8. Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)

9. The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947)

10. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

11. Claire’s Knee (Eric Rohmer, 1970)

Dan is happy to read and respond to your emails if you feel so inclined as to send them his way. Reach him at dansullivan88 AT gmail.com.