It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
In James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, the wife recalls a young man who was in love with her and died some years before, and as she remembers him he seems to come more vividly alive in her imagination than her husband who stands in front of her. Joyce’s story may not have been influenced by cinema but it was written during the art form’s early years, the same year, 1914, that W…
To understand the complexity of Marguerite Duras's The Ravishing of Lol Stein, let us see it as a menage a trois story twice told, with a ten-year gap. To tell one story of a complicated threesome is usually enough for a novel, but Duras wants to dislocate the temporal coordinates of one moment of time all the better to bring forth Time itself. We use time here as Proust utilises it at the end…
really isn’t personal for you is it?” There Daniel was telling me, who had been told by Myra, who was hearing it from her ex, and all I could think about was how odd it seemed that during this walk I’d become interested in the lives of people I didn’t know when I often couldn’t pay much attention to the anecdotes some of the others in our group told me about their exi…
Bad Timing offers about as disorienting an opening six minutes as narrative cinema is likely to provide by giving us five timelines. It manages to offer a gallery visit, a woman rushed to hospital, a person crossing the border, an elegant house party, and a woman apparently drunk and drugged making a cry for help. The woman in all five scenes turns out to be Milena (Theresa Russell), and the film …