I wasn’t expecting this video to turn into a cinematic experience. First of all it’s fascinating as a recording of a process, with all the ensuing preparations, accidents, and recalibrations. Secondly, it works as an implicit view on cinema, where what one chooses to shoot and in what way is a testament in this regard.… Read More Static shots. Perception. The specificity of cinema. A concert by Etran de l’Air
“Last night I had the strangest dream. I was in a laboratory with Dr. Boas and he was talking to me and a group of other people about religion, insisting that life must have a meaning, that man couldn’t live without that. Then he made a mass of jelly-like stuff of the most beautiful blue… Read More Margaret Mead’s dream
“One may ask, on the other hand, whether reality can be staged so accurately that the camera-eye will not detect any difference between the original and the copy. Blaise Cendrars touches on this issue in a neat hypothetical experiment. He imagines two film scenes which are completely identical except for the fact that one has… Read More I shield myself with Kracauer against the mindless expansion of AI
Mesmerizing time capsule, with a restoration featuring a superb contemporary soundtrack by Jeff Mills, which brings out surprising latent qualities of the film. Supposedly praised by Renoir and Vigo, it further fueled my hunger for rewatching (and watching) dozens of French movies (oh, the ultimate cinephilic cliché, but what can I do), and my recent… Read More Études sur Paris (André Sauvage, 1928)
So many times, when watching a movie, I experience a sense of frustration: I cannot touch the image, I cannot grasp it, fix it, or retain it (remember that moment in Godard’s “Les Carabiniers” when Michelangelo literally tries to enter the projection screen?) A frame is replaced by another in a way that, although logical… Read More When cinema is no longer needed
The fixity of the frame leads one to see/notice what one normally doesn’t see/notice: a myriad of gestures, facial expressions, the jewelry on the driver’s hands, the play of light on the persons’ bodies and on the inner surface of the car, countless details and events happening outside the car. What one can see through… Read More “Ten” by Abbas Kiarostami
Years ago when I was in high school I watched Epstein’s Le Tempestaire and it left a lasting impression on me. Around about the same time (or maybe a bit later), I found out about Finis Terrae, but I kept postponing watching it for years. A couple weeks ago this movie came back in my… Read More Jean Epstein’s “Finis Terrae” – To navigate one’s emotions
For quite a long time, I didn’t understand what makes Satyajit Ray’s movies feel like home to me and why they gave me what I would call a warm and unromanticised feeling of consistent, fundamental goodness and emotional nourishment. Initially I thought it may simply have something to do with my affinity for the Indian… Read More Satyajit Ray
“What is [the ceremony’s] real aim? Is it to drive out the genii (…)? Or is it to make them come? (…) To use Luc de Heusch’s terminology, is it exorcism or adorcism? This question, which is posed by so many possession cults, is by no means new (…) Michel Leiris makes the following observation:… Read More Trance, possession, the zār, the Self, the Other
