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…
What is cinema ethno-fiction? Some would see it chiefly in documentary, in works by anyone from Robert Flaherty to Jean Rouch — from the staged and planned documentaries that give the impression of fact offered by the former,or the more self-conscious even self-reflexive work by the latter. While Flaherty would stage the walrus hunt in Nanook of the North, Rouch makes us aware of the process…
In Thomas Hardy’s short stories, as in much of his work, there isn’t so much despair as contrived bleakness, a narrative mastery of misery which in another writer’s work might have led to farce. In Hardy’s, though, it suggests a dank realisation that life is a futile striving which will inevitably lead to human defeat and may take the form of disillusion, desolation or diss…
1 When I first came to see the flat, I passed on the first floor an apartment with the door kicked in and the letterbox sealed. I continued up to the third and to the place I was hoping to rent. The flat was tired and yet as I looked around I imagined without difficulty living there. I said I was keen, would wish to stay for a very long time and would they mind, if they were willing to rent it to …
The real is not quite the same thing as realism, and we will later distinguish the two all the better to understand an important aspect of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen. Realism is often contrasted with formalism, with the latter concerned with making cinema distinguish itself from the reality it extracts as a recording device, and realism proposing that cinema should take full advantage of the…