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…
International cinema isn’t always oppositional; it needn’t be viewed as a deliberate counterforce to American film. But when it isn’t, the filmmaker, already half working in the Hollywood idiom, gets pulled into its orbit, and usually starts working stateside. There have been many fine filmmakers that, through necessity or design, have found themselves making American films. In t…
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…