To understand Jean Renoir is to comprehend something of cinema’s relationship with realism, but also its relationship to humanity. In cinema the two words often come together even if they may need a little bit of unpacking — words so laden with assumption cannot be left unqualified. Realism in film, after all, was a position sought after rather than assumed and humanity can mean no mor…
In the Uruguayan writer Horacia Quiroga’s short story The Son, a man searches for the 13-year old boy of the title who has gone missing. There is nothing else in this widowed father’s life and he watches the boy with constant attention and devotion. One day the boy wanders off and hasn’t returned before the designated time and the father is distraught. We have been warned that th…
1 It is well known that the water from the Caribbean makes its way into the rivers and lakes of Scotland. It is at least equally known that our bodies are eighty per cent water. As we get older that percentage decreases, but we might notice many of the people who seek asylum, who try to cross borders, struggle because of no more than twenty per cent of their body mass. The water travels freely thr…
Robert B. Pippin's beautifully designed The Philosophical Hitchcock couches itself within the realm of philosophy but feels more casual, meditative and informal than we might have expected as it focuses chiefly on Vertigo. Perhaps if it were foremost a work of philosophy it would have attended more strongly to the question it offers in the introduction: the problem of unknowingness and its rel…