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…
Looking at a handful of specifically English films between the beginning of the seventies to the early nineties, we can see how the shake-up that Britain needed wasn’t a return to authority and traditional values; it needed a reassessment of those that had been tempered without being countered. It was as if the post-war consensus was never really consensual but chiefly a suspension of hostil…
To understand the complexity of Marguerite Duras's The Ravishing of Lol Stein, let us see it as a menage a trois story twice told, with a ten-year gap. To tell one story of a complicated threesome is usually enough for a novel, but Duras wants to dislocate the temporal coordinates of one moment of time all the better to bring forth Time itself. We use time here as Proust utilises it at the end…
1 His was a Scottish titanium Celtic knot ring and hers was an Irish white gold Irish ring. The rings were in a similar style but his was chunky and he would always take it off when using the pull-up bar, while hers she insisted felt as if it wasn’t just on her hand as an object but also as a presence she felt as a reassurance. He couldn’t wait to take the ring off at night and this wa…
How does ideology work in film? Today we will think about gun violence. Just as there is the Bechdel test to judge a film’s sexism as it finds out if there are any conversations in the movie between two women that aren't about men, maybe we need a Magnum test to find out if an American film can tell a story without the presence of a gun. If Chekhov famously proposed if you have a weapon …