Don’t Swoon: Howl when you’re far from home. Weep at Nature’s wonders.
But, dearest sister, never ever swoon.
Category: Essays
The Phantom Archivist and The Phantom Archives: The Amateur Online Archive of Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
“Kahan’s site encroaches on the nascent landscape of a new mode of archival behavior, increasingly obligatory in and enabled by the digital age, in which archival collections move out of the physical tyranny of closed vaults, reconceived as virtual and dynamic, to empower a wider audience of users through hypermodern modes of informed and active engagement.”
Remote Viewing: Observations Inspired or Furthered by And They Were Two in One and One in Two
“If, as [Nicola] Masciandaro claims, ‘cinema’s witness’ is ‘somewhere between the pure loss of head (negatively being no one) and the playful transcendence of the capital (positively being neither oneself nor someone else),’ then this witness’s penumbral status becomes not only ontologically problematic, but morally problematic into the bargain.”
What Exactly Is the “Road” in the Road Movie? (Fragments on Narrative Endings)
“We’ve long since lost faith in endings; the postmodern project of ‘decentering’ everything has made it irrelevant whether our endings end with conjugal bliss, a predicted death, nothingness, a tree, an empty gaze, or any assorted marginalia.”
Activist & Political · Essays · Historical & Epic
A Journey into Political Consciousness: Africa as “Setting and Backdrop” in Shekhar Kapur’s The Four Feathers (2002)
“In reflecting the postcolonial sensibilities, rather than the imperialist enthusiasms, of the early twenty-first century, the film is very much a creature of its time.”
August and Everything After: A Half-Century of Surfing in Cinema
Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair. — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
The Strangeness of Realism vs. the Realism of the Strange: Themes in Synecdoche, New York
“Charlie Kaufman’s film(script) can be understood as a commentary on a line from E. M. Cioran: ‘He who does not believe in the impossibility of truth, or does not rejoice in it, has only one road to salvation, which he will, however, never find.'”
“Drunk Literature”: On Malcolm Lowry, John Huston, and Under the Volcano
“Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals
The Music of Words: Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films
“While Powell and Pressburger were masters of the classic show-don’t-tell method, they also daringly broke the rule by telling, not showing. Both techniques ultimately serve the same purpose. Despite the aesthetic of excess often attributed to the Archers’ films, they gain power by withholding certain elements, requiring the audience to supply what’s not there.”
The Women in Prison Film: From Reform to Revolution 1922-1974
“The cheap production values of most WIP films required them to rely on the promise of forbidden spectacles such as sex (‘Love Starved Women!’), violence (‘Rape, riot, and revenge’), and often the pretense of an exposé (“The story of a woman’s prison today’) to attract moviegoers.”
What’s “Natural” about “Naturalist” Cinema? On Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2012)
“Director Arnold heightens the once-“natural” processes of life events such as birth and death by setting them outside, historically as if for the last time, before Western medicine and Victorian domesticity.”
Hidden Within Ourselves: A Psychoanalytic Examination of the Effects of Repression in Michael Haneke’s Caché
“Caché lays bare a heavy psychological truth about the collective unconscious — without submitting to another perspective, we may not be able to recognize and acknowledge the abject parts of our own selves, even when they are clearly presented to us, hidden in plain sight.”
“Where Are We Now?” A Still Life in Moving Frame
“I wish I was beside her but I’m not there, I’m gone” — from I’m Not There, Bob Dylan
Fun in the Aristotelian Supermarket: A Dramatic Sketch on the Future of Visuality
“Bottled and packaged products were sold mainly according to static imagery and rhetorical claims. With the advancing sophistication of the cinematic age, however, we gradually developed a taste for kinesthesia, ending the false dignity of stasis. The famous Heinz commercial, featuring ketchup slowly trickling downward onto a nude meat patty, was our watershed moment, our epiphany.”
God Bless Us Everyone, Including Bankers and Businessmen
They might be learning to be human, too
“Gatsby? What Gatsby?” Discovering Fitzgerald’s Most Elusive Character, in the Novel and the Movies
“When I told my students I have a harder time than that shrugging off Hollywood’s misguided adaptations and revisions, one said, ‘Why? Whenever you want to, you can still go back and read the book.'”
Activist & Political · Essays · TV & Streaming
When the World Was Wide(r): A Requiem for PBS: Why are there no nonpartisan attacks on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?
“There was a time when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, ‘formed as an educational, non-commercial, and public interest alternative to the vast wasteland of commercial networks,’ meant something other than drearily underproduced Anglophone mysteries, self-help seminars for pensioners and forced retirees, staged cooking lessons, cheapjack puppet shows, and various and unspeakable retrenchments of the petit bourgeoisie.”
Cutters’ Way: The Mysterious Art of Film Editing
“The basic rules of film editing, first established in the silent era, still govern the industry today: maintain your eye lines, preserve continuity, respect planarity (the rules governing the transposition of three dimensions onto a two-dimensional plane), find a good rhythm, and, most important, always advance the story.”
Gentlemen Prefer Bland Homogeneity: Unless They Have to Pitch in with the Others
Then goodness knows what will happen
Sex on the Beach: The Yin Yang of Female Sex Tourism in Two Films
“I didn’t come all the way down to Jamaica to become a slut.”— How Stella Got Her Groove Back
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