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"...all art is sex!"
Recently I watched Savage Messiah, which I'd never seen, and it got some things ticking along in my head alongside some other things that relate to the First World War. I also realize I haven't seen...
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Magic Space
In the opening of Brisseau's À l’aventure, the absence of a conventional establishing shot allows for great play with space as we move from a medium close-up where it appears out character is in her...
View ArticleAccounts
"His face had the arrogance, the bruised lips of someone determined to live without money." - James Salter, "Via Negativa" (in Dusk and Other Stories)"One of his chief difficulties had always been that...
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Isn't it romantic?
World is burning; I took a little time out to watch Hôtel du Nord (Marcel Carné, 1938) - a fantasy of gritty realities, and the reality of fantasy and yearning.
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Crisis
I am deeply fortunate and thankful to be able to work from home during this COVID-19 scare. Although I looked forward to sleeping in (since I wouldn't have to commute), my brain wouldn't let me. I got...
View ArticlePushing it
"My friend Cara told me that it was clear that when I was at my lowest, what I needed most was art--not comfort--and so it was to get through cancer that I had to wish everything around me into...
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Coping
As I age, I find it more and more difficult to rank films that I love. I'm increasingly sensitive to the contingent, circumstantial aspects of watching movies. What if I'm tired, what if I'm distracted...
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Long Shots
Mountains of the Moon (Bob Rafelson, 1990) exhibits big landscape shots, often with less sky than you might imagine, and re-enacts colonialist expedition by means of pictorial drama and slideshow. This...
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Contingency Plans
Joanna Hogg's films, which I've been thinking about and trying to write a little bit about for the past few years, off and on, are great for a lot of reasons but one of them is that they know how to...
View ArticleBest Pitcher
Until recently, I'd never seen Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984), and what struck me upon finally viewing this lengthy Best Picture-winner was how freewheeling it seemed. It's enjoyable. I always had a...
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Frankness
I admit Carnal Knowledge took me by surprise: it wasn't quite what I expected from a film directed by Mike Nichols, nor a Jules Feiffer screenplay. It has some of the topography of what I think of as...
View ArticleLil Stabs
Stray notes on a few experimental short films I watched online a few weeks ago ...Peter Gidal's Clouds (1969), at least as viewed via Vimeo, prompts us to scrutinize our sense of direction on and with...
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Moving On Up
I want and need to keep writing, but the impulse to be productive, even in a way that is personally fulfilling, feels like I'm forcing myself to fit the Protestant work ethic. O lucky man am I. More...
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Experiments in Something
Almost nobody is likely to see this, or anything that may be forthcoming, right now. Which is preferable, maybe. I'm just putting this here for my own purposes, to see something. Images above from...
View ArticlePensive
For some, the image of pretension is a black turtleneck type using complicated jargon, but for me it’s a rich theater kid affecting Deep Thoughts about whatever middlebrow cultural object is most hyped...
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Sleeping On It
... a collage quotation in search of a theme ... “Generally speaking, art is part of an uneven global system, one that underdevelops some parts of the world, while overdeveloping others—and the...
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The Making Of
Black Rose Ascension (Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1975) - a very interesting, in parts corrosive and unsavory film tracking the nitty gritty of a low budget pornographic film shoot, including the...
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Hunted
Knife Under the Throat (Claude Mulot, 1986) Formal and pictorial beauty as byproduct, seemingly, of more monetary concerns; rippled out from a place more famously represented by Jean Rollin ...
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Treasures and Tombs
Land of the Pharaohs (Howard Hawks, 1955) - though in some ways less "epic" than, say, Ben-Hur, it also features a presence of physical scale and monumentality that I would liken to somewhat more...
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