“The subject of this essay is custodial violence in Tamil cinema, films produced in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where over a hundred custodial deaths were recorded in the past two decades without a single conviction.” Continue reading Squeal Like a Pig—Custodial Violence in Tamil Cinema
In 1962, film critic and theorist Victor Perkins of Movie magazine complained of ‘landscape mongering’ in the English films of the late 1950s/early 1960s – they were part of a movement known as Kitchen Sink Realism. Continue reading Essay: Urban Landscapes and Modernity in Kitchen Sink Realism
A teenage girl lies on a towel, stealing glances at a man swimming in an indoor pool. The man, who might be her mother’s age, whips around as if sensing someone’s gaze and the girl flinches out of sight, slipping as she does into prayer — intoned and feverish, like an incantation: mother most chaste mother most pure mother without fault… Continue reading Lucrecia Martel: Four Feature Films
The destruction of a building: more important than the brief moment of the blast are the hours leading up to the detonation. Continue reading The Awkward Altbau – Urban Structures and Dreams of the Future in Konrad Wolf’s ‘Solo Sunny’ (1980)
Around the end of 2015, Alex Tripp had the idea to start keeping track of the music he’d heard. Continue reading Listening After 5 Years
Today we are very excited to share with you the full PDF of a lecture by renowned theorist Gene Youngblood. Titled Secession From The Broadcast, it was first delivered in Buenos Aires, in 2012. A PDF of the Spanish translation of the lecture is forthcoming, via desistfilm. There are still precious few copies (in an extremely limited print run of 55) of the physical book … Continue reading ‘Secession From The Broadcast’ by Gene Youngblood
by Alonso Aguilar In the oppressive temperatures of rural Brazil, bodies traverse the screen unceremoniously. Detached and absent-minded, different characters go through the motions of hard labor, unfazed by the thick layers of sweat drenching every inch of their clothes. They’re physically present, yet their minds are clearly elsewhere, refusing to be shaped by what they consider to be arbitrary circumstances. Eventually, their shifts end … Continue reading The Value of Intimacy – ‘Divine Love’ and the corporeal cinema of Gabriel Mascaro
by Ruairí McCann Near the end of Tsai Ming-liang’s film Afternoon (2015) — a conversation, filmed across 134 minutes and 4 shots, between Tsai and his muse Lee Kang-sheng — the filmmaker fills a lull with prognostication on his art. Influenced by the shadow of Stray Dogs (2013), a production troubled by Tsai’s own health complications, he contemplates never making another movie. However, he quickly … Continue reading Review: ‘Days’ (2020, dir. Tsai Ming-liang) – London Film Festival
In his essay “The Queen of Sheba,”1 Iranian critic Hesam Amiri recounts the reactions that The House Is Black (1963) received from reviewers upon its release. The common thread among all of the predominantly negative reviews was that the film was deemed “too feminine” or (contradicting the prior claim) that it was not actually directed by Forough Farrokhzad, but by her partner, the prominent filmmaker and writer Ebrahim Golestan… Continue reading On Bodies: ‘The House Is Black’ and the Politics of Corporeal Representation(s)
Check out my latest piece of film criticism, an essay about unloaded guns in The Lobster, Slow West, Carol, and The Forbidden Room freshly posted over at Photogénie! Continue reading Essay: ‘Dry Fires’
ULTRA DOGME 