Part 8 Souvenirs The past is dangerously addictive. Nostalgia, especially second-hand nostalgia such as mine, often threatens to become an endless placebo in place of living. How alluring the past seems when we convince ourselves of having experienced it for a brief moment through culture and art. The ghost story writer M.R. James lived with this addiction to the past more than most. James famously … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 9)
Part 7 Remembering Afterimage ‘At times,’ the Nobel Laureate and novelist Patrick Modiano writes, ‘it seems, our memories act much like Polaroids.’ This interesting thought comes from the semi-autobiographical perspective of a character in his novella Afterimage (1993). It is a narrative filled with strangeness, derived in part from the recollection of memories once forgotten; put to one side, left in the back of a … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 8)
Part 5 In the Park I often find myself asking a question. ‘What film would I live in if I could?’ It is a question that belies my own rather childish need to escape reality. But, if I could live in a piece of film, it would probably be Michelangelo Antonioni’s celebrated swinging cult classic, Blowup (1966). It is more than a little questionable as … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 6)
It’s that time of year once again when I look back on everything I’ve watched and read (and wonder whether I should really get out more). While my interests have become a kind of prison, I couldn’t hope for a more entertaining one. So, here’s my review of 2023. Thank you for reading my work throughout the year, wherever you may have seen it. Cinema … Continue reading 2023 Review
“But to learn to dye is better than to study the ways of dying.” – Sir Thomas Browne Writing He stalks with a lens, Short hair and floral dresses: Red, Deep red. The lens is a recollection, Occurring at a wooden desk, With a typewriter, Tapped by fingers, clothed in black leather; Dead skin masks for desperate hands. No prints. Writing violence. The lens is … Continue reading Deep Red; or Renditions of Murder
Chantal Akerman’s early features have one aspect in common: all are suffused with loneliness. In her first fiction feature, Je Tu Il Elle (1974), a character wanders between lovers old and new but is always confused as to what she really wants, only really content in isolation. In Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), we follow a woman trapped in the monotony of a mysteriously empty everyday … Continue reading All The Lonely People
For a while after watching Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker, 1991), I repeatedly heard the sound of ink scratching from a nib onto rough paper and canvas. This action occurs throughout the almost four hour long film, to the point where the process of painting – from its earliest preparatory sketches to a devilish, unseen final canvas – feels almost conveyed in … Continue reading Accumulation in Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991)
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
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
One of my favourite scenes in cinema is, in fact, not really a scene at all but a moment; a collection of three shots that has very little to do with the overall narrative but everything to do with the humanity questioned in the film. The film is Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue (1994) and the moment is when Juliette Binoche, playing a woman in … Continue reading Skin On Stone – Grief in Three Colours: Blue (1994)
Celluloid Wicker Man 