Berfrois

Harry enters a fugue state and comes to identify as none other than Santa himself...

Read More

The Flooring of Silent Bob

The Flooring of Silent Bob

This is how it started: I’d seen the preview a few months back, and was about a year into an only-watching-horror-movies thing that had developed as a strange post-trauma coping mechanism.

Read More

70-Minute Mark by Nicholas Rombes et al.

70-Minute Mark by Nicholas Rombes et al.

The different tools used to capture the frame and the wild variety in terms of image quality, which is the way films are remembered anyway, not always as pristine HD, but sometimes smudged and tangled up with our variances of mood. In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes...

Read More

Is The Wolf of Wall Street ironic?

Is The Wolf of Wall Street ironic?

Via From London Review of Books: Asked for his response to those critics who saw in The Wolf of Wall Street an undiluted celebration of the bad life – drugs, sex, money, jewels, a very large yacht and expensive suits – Leonardo DiCaprio said: ‘If they don’t get the...

Read More

Daniel Bosch: High

Daniel Bosch: High

Against a black background, part of the face of a fair-skinned woman. The tone and texture of her skin. The curve of her lips. Especially the black of her eyes — as if we could look through her. All these exceed not only what we expect to see when...

Read More

Nicholas Rombes: 70

Nicholas Rombes: 70

As we move deeper into the twenty-first century our world seems evermore bifurcated between the known and the hidden, and this visible divide characterizes our own psychotic state. On the one hand, as the Snowden documents show, we are all of us watched by groups whose names we don't...

Read More

James Glickman: Whedon’s Shakespeare

James Glickman: Whedon’s Shakespeare

Joss Whedon’s recent Much Ado About Nothing embodies the question: can movies made from Shakespeare still find a wide audience? It has been a long trajectory since 1948 when Laurence Olivier's Hamlet got seven nominations and three Academy awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor, to the late ‘90s...

Read More

Restoration Revamped

Restoration Revamped

In the Land of the Head Hunters, Edward S. Curtis, 1914 by Oliver Farry In the Land of the Head Hunters, dir. Edward S. Curtis, 65 minutes One of the best films of 2013 was released in 1914. Edward S. Curtis, well known for his documentary photographs of the...

Read More

“Property” (intended in a pejorative sense)

“Property” (intended in a pejorative sense)

12 Years a Slave, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2013 From The New York Review of Books: The film is unflinching in its portrayal of brutality. Noosed, strung up, and choking with just his toes touching the dirt in punishment for attacking the overseer Tibeats, Northup seems to hang forever, as...

Read More

For Neon

For Neon

by Eleanor Courtemanche The Bling Ring, dir. Sofia Coppola, U.S.A, 90 minutes It’s hard to watch Sofia Coppola’s 2013 The Bling Ring, which came out on DVD about a month ago, without feeling like you’re at the end of a chain (no, I didn’t say human chain) of recycled...

Read More

Two Visual Tropes = Love by Masha Tupitsyn

Two Visual Tropes = Love by Masha Tupitsyn

Do we see (have) these kinds of moments of seeing in real life or do they happen only in camera space? In the fiction of movies. Is the face of the lover loving and seeing the lover restricted to mise-en-scène? Is the lover's face just another visual trope? Two...

Read More