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…
Blu Review: Two Silent Films by John Ford (Eureka!)
by Ruairí McCann Produced and released by Eureka Entertainment’s Masters of Cinema line, this new Blu-ray boxset of two early silent John Ford westerns is most welcome. Not only […]
Diaspora and Disappearance: ‘Letter From Your Far-Off Country’ and ‘Maat Means Land’
In our first piece of ‘Prismatic Ground’ coverage, Ruairí McCann compares ‘Maat Means Land’ and ‘Letter From Your Far-Off Country’
The Awkward Altbau – Urban Structures and Dreams of the Future in Konrad Wolf’s ‘Solo Sunny’ (1980)
The destruction of a building: more important than the brief moment of the blast are the hours leading up to the detonation.
On how things actually play out
To be regarded as an artist, as a person, rather than a ‘woman filmmaker’, a ‘woman’.
JD 2.0
Since the official start of the pandemic one year ago, I have found myself thinking about Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975) every now and then.
Winter for Rose
I am absolutely tickled by the fact of a filmmaker named Rose making a name for herself with a ‘Bouquet’ series, collecting flowers.
Your Laughter is Spit in the World’s Face: Milla (2017) and Valérie Massadian
“Instead of offering closeted conservative condemnation, or liberal handwringing and outsized guilt, Massadian has been making a cinema of the ‘animal’ intensities and lucidity of childhood and the often debilitating growing pains of young adulthood.”
Betty and Marie
Marie Trintignant retains a few performative constants as the ground shifts below her feet as the title character in Claude Chabrol’s Betty (1992): a stare that vacillates between the suggestively dim and the piercing, an insatiable whiskey habit, rampant chain smoking, a visage that appears as if it’ll crack into surrender at any given moment, and a Chanel suit as uniform.