November 2011
14 posts
2 tags
“Slapstick is a mode of thought in Godard, another way of exploring possibility;...”
– Richard Combs, “François Truffaut: Day Into Night” Film Comment (2011)
Also: “The way James Monaco interprets Truffaut’s pairings (in his contribution to Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary) is in line with a view of Truffaut’s expansive humanism: ‘these...
4 tags
“Image also plays a critical role in separating the two countries’ pop...”
– Patrick St. Michel, “How Korean Pop Conquered Japan” The Atlantic (September 13, 2011)
Aside from that gratuitous, self-satisfied final sentence, this paragraph is quite interesting. I wish I knew more about both cultures to extrapolate anything from this with any certainty—and...
1 tag
October 2011
10 posts
2 tags
“I attended a panel on Kael at the New York Film Festival, where Kellow took...”
– Self-Styled Siren, “Lucking Out and Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark”
1 tag
“On August 2, at the very first meeting of what was to become Occupy Wall Street,...”
– David Graeber, “Enacting the Impossible: On Consensus Decision Making”
Also: “We may never be able to prove, through logic, that direct democracy, freedom and a society based on principles of human solidarity are possible. We can only demonstrate it through action.”
2 tags
3 tags
My review of Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In →
I started writing for Spectrum Culture, and this is my first review for them, so I hope you’ll check it out. I think Almodóvar’s latest is really great, and it was a joy to think and write about this film. It’s a little disappointing that the film isn’t getting as much attention as it deserves, which is strange because this is one of his most “out-there” films...
1 tag
“Two related late-modern developments have eroded the viability of the...”
– Nicholas Rombes, from the roundtable discussion “The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2”
2 tags
“The conventional wisdom is backwards. The black patient isn’t resistant...”
– The Last Psychiatrist, “Recent Trends in Stimulant Medication Use Among U.S. Children”
1 tag
“In his book on Francis Bacon, Deleuze writes that art “is not a matter of...”
– Steven Shaviro, from the roundtable discussion “The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2”
If art is about capturing forces, then the force cinema is most well-equipped to capture is time, which reminds me of Yausjiro Ozu’s There Was a Father, of which...
1 tag
1 tag
September 2011
10 posts
1 tag
“Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our...”
– Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
More of this, please!
1 tag
“Since film permits of no psychological explanations, the possibility of a change...”
– Béla Balázs, Visible Man or the Culture of Film
1 tag
“The real interface in the auditorium, the material border between spectator and...”
– Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An introduction through the senses
2 tags
“It would have been unnecessary to survey departing audience members to gauge...”
– Andrew Grossman, “Twelve-Tone Cinema: A Scattershot Notebook on Sexual Atonality” Bright Lights Film Journal Issue 43 (February 2004)
Grossman’s describing a screening in 1999 at the Chinatown Music Palace (located in New York City) of the film Hero Dream, “a low budget,...
4 tags
Masochism, Sadism, and the "Perverse Pleasure of...
In watching Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, I found it helpful to consider the ideas advanced in Gilles Deleuze’s book Masochism: An Intepretation of Coldness and Cruelty and especially Gaylyn Studlar’s pioneering essay “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema.” The latter essay notably advances the study of film beyond the orthodox understanding of the...
3 tags
“If feminist theory has reason to lament that system of representation [of women...”
– Kaja Silverman, “Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image,” Male Subjectivity at the Margins. 