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…
Lee Chang-dong’s Burning is, if you like,what happens when a Korean filmmaker absorbs two antithetical auteurs (Hitchcock and Antonioni), as he combines Hitchcock’s fascination with the inferential object, and Antonioni’s ability to symptomatize a cultural moment. At the same time, Lee works with Hitchcock’s suspense within Antonioni’s sense of mystery. When Alain Rob…
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, Henry James might appear at his most morbid, but one way of thinking about James’s work is the attenuation of cause and effect. Here, a man goes each day to church and lights a candle to the various dead who are no longer in his life, including and most especially Mary Antrim, a woman he was due to marry. There, he sees a younger woman who is lighting …
1 He told the story as if searching for its ending, aware that there was more to the telling than he could presently convey. Five of us were sitting outside, around a small table at a pub in Marchmont. It was mid-summer, and the weather was as warm as we could ever recall. We were all in tee-shirts commenting on the weeks of dry, windless heat, and, of course, couldn’t help wondering if this…
Muriel Spark is often a writer of harsh judgments and cruel predictions, with the former available in observation, and the latter as a technique. A word often used to describe her sensibility is acerbic, with Charlotte Higgins noting her “slender novels share a wit that travels along a sliding scale from charming to acerbic to utterly deadly.” (Guardian) Sameer Rahim reckons “Mur…