Tag: Celluloid Wicker Man

Film, Uncategorized

An Exhaustive List of Nothing and Everything in Chantal Akerman’s Flat

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

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Art, Uncategorized

Responses: Keith Arnatt’s Gardeners (1978-79)

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)

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Film, Uncategorized

They Lay With Debris – Wreckage in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979)

“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)

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Art, Film, Uncategorized

Still life in Margaret Tait’s My Room (1951)

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)

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Film, Psychogeography, Uncategorized

Cartographic Time

In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges published the story, On Exactitude in Science. The piece is a fragment of a 1658 fictional volume written by the equally fictitious Suárez Miranda. Its story addresses the role of cartography, relying upon the ironic endeavour of a group of cartographers attempting to make a 1:1 scale map; the map referring back to the original with such precision that it sits … Continue reading Cartographic Time

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Film, Literature, Uncategorized

Gertrude Stein’s Rose and Chris Marker’s Owl

When recently reading Gertrude Stein’s famous poem Sacred Emily (1913), later published in Geography and Plays (1922) and famed for its sequence of “A rose is a rose is a rose…”, I was not thinking about a rose. Instead of a rose, I was in fact thinking of an owl. Before reading anything by Gertrude Stein, I had watched copious amounts of films by Chris … Continue reading Gertrude Stein’s Rose and Chris Marker’s Owl

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Film, Film Music and Sound, Literature, Uncategorized

The Temporal Disruptions of Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras was never keen on giving cinema an easy time. Adapting her own stories into feature films, it seems that the writer, rather than compromise the unusual qualities of her books, experimented and destabilised the narrative aspects of film form to suit her needs instead. Like her contemporary, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Duras made many attempts to transplant the elements of voice from her literary work … Continue reading The Temporal Disruptions of Marguerite Duras

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Literature, Psychogeography, Uncategorized

Phantom Coincidence in W.G. Sebald’s “Remembered Triptych…”

A few years ago, I was sat on a couch in Strasbourg reading essays by Teju Cole from the volume Known And Strange Things. It was night and I was alone, glancing up occasionally, as I often did when in my ex-partner’s flat, to stare at the city’s famous cathedral lit up at night. I was at the point of the book when Cole begins to … Continue reading Phantom Coincidence in W.G. Sebald’s “Remembered Triptych…”

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