What is reincarnative narration, other than a bit of a mouthful? It is where a film’s capacity to carry its story, its mode, its theme, happens to be through the dissolution of character rather than through its solidity. We see it in Vertigo and Psycho, in Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr., and in still more experimental form in Weerasetekhul’s Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century…
Blonde is almost a thousand pages long in the Fourth Estate paperback and an unequivocal account of Marilyn Monroe without quite passing for a biography. It is a work of literature rather than of research, with Joyce Carol Oates saying “I’d hoped to evoke a poetic, spiritual, “inner” truth”, and insists she did not do “considerable research” (Prairie Schoo…
1 Not so long ago, a friend of mine was frustrated with the work he was doing in the world of corporate videos when he was offered a project that surprisingly stimulated him, leading to a change in direction that he believed may have led to new possibilities in the aesthetic, but with a troublesome ethical relationship with the image. I had known Simon for ten years, through a post-graduate colleg…
Millennial European cinema is so often a cinema of concern, though often couched within an identificatory indifference. Whether it is Michael Haneke’s work or the Dardenne brothers’ films, Cristian Mungiu’s or Yorgos Lanthimos’s, this is a Europe that cannot easily pass through consideration for others without acknowledging selfishness within oneself. This is perhaps the ce…