Chance played a huge role in the writing of Robert Walser. I can picture his slow meanderings around towns and valleys, spotting something that fired his brief need to write before getting distracted by something else entirely. I can see him getting excited by the way sunlight reflects off a lake’s water, by the fustiness of a suited man coming out of a bank, by … Continue reading Responses: Tacita Dean’s Berlin And The Artist (2012)
When I think of the films of Luis Buñuel, the first image that comes to mind is that of the corpse of a murdered child. Her legs are strewn among the branches of deep, dark woodland, and her legs covered in snails. The image in question is from Buñuel’s 1964 film Diary Of A Chambermaid; a relatively straight film for the director and lacking the overt … Continue reading Snails and Death
I first came across Cindy Sherman’s photographic series, Untitled Film Stills (1977), when looking for photos of film noir titles. The series is designed around fakery, seeking to recreate the feeling of stills from 1950s and 1960s American films but also, in producing the illusion with general key-notes as to the roles of women in these films, comment upon the basic norms prescribed in Hollywood … Continue reading Responses: Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977)
I recently finished a draft of a novel which follows a lone woman mentally cast adrift by the news of her father’s suicide. Her grief manifests in a strange obsession with the town of Strasbourg where she decides on a whim to stay over the winter. In one part of the novel, my character looks into the concept of Fernweh, though really it was as … Continue reading Fernweh and The Green Ray
When Georges Perec was 11, he decided to wander. In fact, escape is perhaps a better description; a jailbreak from his aunt’s house on Rue de l’Assomption. He wandered Paris with who knows what planned. It was such a defining experience for the writer that he later composed a text surrounding the feeling of release and the places he encountered on this lost meander called … Continue reading Georges Perec Escapes
Fifty years ago this September, Chantal Akerman made her first film. It was a short, comical fragment about distraction and suicide called Saute Ma Ville (1968). Following Akerman herself running up to her flat, the film then shows her gradually making a mess of the kitchen where she has locked herself, taping the gaps in the door and windows ready for a slow death. The … Continue reading An Exhaustive List of Nothing and Everything in Chantal Akerman’s Flat
In the late 1970s, Keith Arnatt embarked on an unusual series of photographs collected under the title of Gardeners (1978-79). In the years before, he had produced a similar series of works looking at dog walkers, such was the draw of the ordinary for the artist. Essentially, however, it is what Arnatt found in this seemingly everyday scenario that tapped into his usual sense of … Continue reading Responses: Keith Arnatt’s Gardeners (1978-79)
“In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around… Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind… And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, sweet wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s … Continue reading They Lay With Debris – Wreckage in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979)
This article contains spoilers. Though Michael Haneke is at pains to stress the nuance of his opinions regarding digital life and discourse – see, for example, his recent interview with the BFI – it is undeniable that his film work has had a consistent approach to media and what he believes its effects are upon Western society. In many ways, his comments often denying such pessimistic … Continue reading Collapse and Gesture in Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017)
I was wandering around the National Gallery recently when I came across Jan Trek’s Still Life (1648) and its wonderful rendering of ephemera. Within it sits a skull, some books, manuscripts, the helmet of a suit of armour and other such seemingly random objects. I had been thinking about similar paintings for some time, not least because several books of interest (specifically Robert Burton’s The … Continue reading Still life in Margaret Tait’s My Room (1951)
Celluloid Wicker Man 