To understand Jean Renoir is to comprehend something of cinema’s relationship with realism, but also its relationship to humanity. In cinema the two words often come together even if they may need a little bit of unpacking — words so laden with assumption cannot be left unqualified. Realism in film, after all, was a position sought after rather than assumed and humanity can mean no mor…
In The Outsider, Albert Camus’ central character Meursault finds a story from the residue of a newspaper underneath his straw mattress. There he reads about a man from Czechoslovakia who leaves home and returns many years later wealthy and with a wife and child. He goes back to his home village but wants to surprise his mother and his sister, so books his wife and child into a hotel and goes…
1 It is well known that the water from the Caribbean makes its way into the rivers and lakes of Scotland. It is at least equally known that our bodies are eighty per cent water. As we get older that percentage decreases, but we might notice many of the people who seek asylum, who try to cross borders, struggle because of no more than twenty per cent of their body mass. The water travels freely thr…
Robert B. Pippin's beautifully designed The Philosophical Hitchcock couches itself within the realm of philosophy but feels more casual, meditative and informal than we might have expected as it focuses chiefly on Vertigo. Perhaps if it were foremost a work of philosophy it would have attended more strongly to the question it offers in the introduction: the problem of unknowingness and its rel…