(Ed. Note: Originally published at Image Facts.) “Does a passive infrared scanner… see into me – into us – clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published in Image Facts.) I went off on Hess pretty hard in a piece published a while back byMetaphilm, reading it along the lines of the ignorant nihilism that informs Gummo (one of the worst things produced by America in the 90’s). Despite the aimlessness of Napoleon Dynamite, which I argued appears at first […]
(Ed. Note: Originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.) Shadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime. – Joseph Cornell Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which […]
(Ed. Note: Originally published at The Matthew’s House Project) “When the child was a child, it walked with his arms swinging. It wanted the stream to be a river, the river a torrent, and this puddle to be a sea. When the child was a child, it didn’t know it was a child. Everything was full […]
(Ed. Note: Originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.) There is a gaunt literary cliché that perfectly describes the state of what can only problematically be described as “Christian film criticism”: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For lack of a better term, self-professed Christians have been writing film […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at The Matthew’s House Project.) Or, David Lynch 101 Mulholland Drive is the latest addition to a bizarre canon. This canon is a body of work slowly spreading out through film history on a trail pioneered by films designed to defy conventional methods of understanding. Next to Tarkovsky’s stark clarity or […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published in The Matthew’s House Project.) Is this really just a Detective remake? “My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published in The Matthew’s House Project.) Wavelength has been a fixture in the canon of avant-garde filmmaking ever since its first appearance in 1967. As much performance art or installation art as filmmaking, it is just one 45-minute cut of an extended time-lapse zoom focused on a spot on the wall between two […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) The Green Ray (sometimes known as “Summer” due to a quirk in its American distribution) is one of Rohmer’s more personal films, which is saying a lot. His films are typically about well-defined individuals coming to terms with themselves through a moral or emotional crisis. Rohmer’s indirect style […]