Even though this Chattanooga only appears in flashes in Jarrod Whaley’s Hell is Other People, it works well as background for this perfectly cast take on unemployment, self-awareness, and really awkward attempts at initiating human contact.
Even though I like Steven Soderbergh, I don’t understand him. The way he ranges from the linear density of sex, lies and videotape to the off-kilter drama of Kafka and Schizopolis to crime thrillers, period pieces, possible Oscar bait, and science fiction retakes makes it difficult to talk about him as an auteur. If he […]
So many of our identity markers are doomed to extinction because we have trouble producing images that will enact or rehearse them as formative ideas. (Or “performative” ideas?) Because it is effective, The Ordinary Radicals shows us that there is a need for more Christian documentaries and essay films, which in light of Matthew’s language would be better eyes for the body.
Tarantino’s films expose the Binx Bolling in us all, restless until we have a tidy border of cultural reference within which we can claim our stake. Most of his intricately scripted and arranged films are hardwired into the idea that his audience has nostalgic connections to all the bits of media history he is tossing out at us.
Cycling image by image through the idea of things being revealed and unveiled, the dawn that sets the film in motion culminates in the eyes of Johan’s wife fluttering awake – her resurrection an event that is consistent with the film’s almost theological preoccupation with images slowly growing in clarity. It is also an event that makes a MacGuffin out Johan’s despair, an incarnation of the glimmering light that suffuses Reygadas’ natural cinematography.
Whether via Tarkovsky’s plaintively spiritual pacing or Dumont’s steely resolve to resist expressive embellishment, these kinds of films are not as much about ideas and gestures as they are about passing time in a particular way – in Revanche for example, passing time after a staggering personal loss.
For Buñuel, the absurdity of the world is only matched by those who attempt to redeem it by placing themselves in its context. It is this movement of the Church that Buñuel attempts to expose as a Dadaist banality, an undoing of the very thing it seeks to do. Nazarín is the parable of a Church caught up in the very system it is seeking to subvert, only to discover that it has itself been subverted by Orwell’s bootheel, Hitchen’s Missionary Position, the faceless horror of Camus’ prison.
The Secret Name of Cinema is Transformation Transform, transform anything everything — stairways into planets buttercups into navals icebergs into elephants — everywhere everything the old scene renewed by seeing the unseen seen anew transformed (James Broughton – Seeing the Light) A few days ago, the Boston Globe’s website released a series of stunning photographs […]
But in Filmwell terms, many of the book’s cutting edges correspond to all those moments in which the cinema becomes a storied means of self-critique or unexpectedly shifts the brackets of our cherished assumptions. We tend to shorthand these experiences as transcendental, or expressionist, or a range of stylistic terms whose Venn diagram intersection is the constructive experience of doubt, fear, and ideological shell-shock.