There has been much said in recent years about the body in cinema, as if somehow before we had film devoid of the corporeal, no matter if we have always been watching shadows thrown onto the screen. Yet isn’t there something to be said for talking so much more about the body recently, as opposed to fifty years ago, and how best can we make sense of the shift? Where we have had Gilles Deleuze…
If the star is exceptional, that needn’t mean they are Gods. They must be seen as different from the average person, but also capable of representing qualities that the viewer can comprehend as close to their own. This is the paradox of the star: they are different, yet the same. They may be better looking, more charismatic or charming than the person paying to watch them on screen, but they…
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 I first noticed him working at a bar in an arthouse cinema in Edinburgh. He was more confident in a particular way than I would expect in an environment that wasn’t averse to hiring attractive people. But these were individuals one might have expected to see working too in an art gallery, a bookshop or a museum. The confidence in him I would have described as cocky, while the type of assur…
Let us propose three useful generalisations: a writer needn’t be clever; they shouldn’t assume a reader is as well-read as they are, and should never claim a reference passes for an insight. Has Ana Lydia Vega in ‘Story-Bound’ failed to act on these assumptions, and would the writing have been better if she had been fair to them? Writers do what they like, and the more form…