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 realism? According to Andre Bazin vital to it was the 'ontological ambiguity of reality' and that film had a duty to the ambiguousness of life in the images it recorded. The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities." ('The Ontology of the Photographic Image') This countered what many believed was important to film: sinc…
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 …
Speaking of Africa, Abderrahmane Sissako says, “…rather than emphasizing a difference, I think people are the same no matter where they are. And the problem is that they’re not portrayed as being the same.” (Film Comment) If Africa is often viewed as obscure Other, then the title of Timbuktu suggests a further sense of distance. In English, we have the saying, from here to…