”Weekend wasn’t done with a script. It came from a personal feeling, a personal intuition, as in Pierrot le Fou. But the intuition in Weekend was closer to the social situation in France than it was in Pierrot le Fou. It came from a clear political analysis and was then transformed into a movie.” (Rolling Stone) Few films more than Weekend possess a predictive dimension, and in t…
If a detective has a clear case to solve and the flaneur has nowhere he has to be, then Patrick Modiano often wonders what happens when you put the enquiring mind of the detective into the body of a perambulator. When Hannah Arendt discussed Walter Benjamin she noted “what all other cities seem to permit only reluctantly to the dregs of society — strolling, idling, flanerie — Par…
1 A friend I hadn’t seen for over a year, who I saw sitting outside a cafe here in Edinburgh, and who insisted I join her if I had time, told me she had recently returned from what had been the most decadent holiday of her life. I had just asked her where she had managed to get such a lovely hue and, as my coffee arrived, she said Turkey, before adding the comment about the holiday’s d…
Of course, US literature is rich, a pun playing on the idea that the country is prosperous and the literature is manifold. But we offer it not only as a pun but as a causal relation. The literature is rich partly because the country happens to be also. Few would be likely to claim that 19th century American literature could be seen as so significant as English, French or Russian fiction, but in th…