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 In the Heart of the Country, J. M. Coetzee looks at a life simultaneously privileged and deprived, one with status but no purpose, possessing mastery but no control. Its central character is off-centre, an askew woman looking for coordinates to live by but lost in the farmlands of a remote place Coetzee does little to locate. What matters is that it isn’t near anywhere in particular, and …
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 …
Comedy is often based on contradicting assumptions and expectations. An apparent idiot proves cleverer than the well-educated; the woman proves stronger than the man; the lowly worker knows better how to run the business than the CEO. In Gregory’s Girl, Bill Forsyth shows a working-class town as idyllic, a female footballer as better than the blokes, and that wisdom is often best found in th…