Tag: Film Review

Film, Landscape, Psychogeography, Uncategorized

All The Lonely People: Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978)

Chantal Akerman’s first series of features in the 1970s have one defining 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. In Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), we follow a woman trapped in the monotony of … Continue reading All The Lonely People: Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978)

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Film, Uncategorized

Accumulation in Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (1991)

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)

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Film, Uncategorized

Fernweh and The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer)

I have recently finished a draft of a novel which follows a lone woman who is mentally cast adrift by the news of her father’s suicide, her grief manifesting in a strange obsession with the town of Strasbourg where she opts to stay over the winter. In one of its sections, I have addressed the concept of Fernweh. The concept is unusual in that it … Continue reading Fernweh and The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer)

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Film, Landscape, Uncategorized

Heart Of Glass (1976) – Optimism in Destruction

On a rock, there sits a man lost in thought.  Or perhaps he is not thinking at all and is instead letting the landscape around him fill his thoughts unconsciously.  Werner Herzog’s 1976 film, Heart of Glass (Herz aus Glas), has one of the director’s strongest opening set of images as the main character of the film sits in a foggy Bavarian landscape with life … Continue reading Heart Of Glass (1976) – Optimism in Destruction

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Film, Uncategorized

Politics of Sequence in Code Unknown (2000, Michael Haneke)

Even before the recent events that occurred in Charlottesville, a certain scene from Michael Haneke’s 2000 film, Code Unknown (Code Inconnu), had been repeatedly playing on a loop in my mind’s eye.  I quietly admitted to myself recently that the scene in question is without a doubt the most telling and poignant dramatic escalation I have seen in twenty-first-century cinema and it seems to show … Continue reading Politics of Sequence in Code Unknown (2000, Michael Haneke)

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Film, Interview

Interview: Mike Hodges on Get Carter (1971).

Mike Hodges’ debut feature film, Get Carter (1971), was one of the key shifts in British cinema of the period.  With its total lack of hope, an earnest presence of violence and a hugely detailed topography, the film is one of the definitive shifts to the more gritty, unremitting cinema produced in the early Heath years alongside the likes of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange … Continue reading Interview: Mike Hodges on Get Carter (1971).

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Film, Landscape, Psychogeography

Stasis In London (1994) – Patrick Keiller.

On watching all of Patrick Keiller’s “Robinson” trilogy of films recently, it struck home how effectively stillness within a visual frame can traverse the geographical plain and recreate a journey that is both political and sociological.  This, of course, goes to the heart filmmaking itself, the relationships with cuts especially and its portrayal of time, space and movement within a diegetic reality all being key … Continue reading Stasis In London (1994) – Patrick Keiller.

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Film, Landscape

The Nowhere Road in The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972) – Luis Buñuel.

Because of their tapestry-like nature, the films of Luis Buñuel lend themselves well to a more in-depth form analysis.  Within their aesthetic ploys and their narrative spines lies a wealth of readings concerning Buñuel’s attacks and treatises on politics and class especially.  His 1972, Oscar-winning film, The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie is a perfect example of how a fragmenting narrative falls into dreamscapes that … Continue reading The Nowhere Road in The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972) – Luis Buñuel.

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Film, Landscape, Literature

Ghosts In The Ice: The Emigrants (W.G. Sebald) and 45 Years (Andrew Haigh).

On finishing W.G. Sebald’s four quartered documentary piece, The Emigrants (1992), I felt as if a loose connection to some recent film or book was hanging midair, waiting to be tied up.  The narrative is split into the stories of four émigrés, all seemingly interconnected by a multitude of strange images but chiefly connected by their fleeing from the rise of Nazi Germany to both … Continue reading Ghosts In The Ice: The Emigrants (W.G. Sebald) and 45 Years (Andrew Haigh).

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Film, Psychogeography

Libidinal Circuits in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) – Jean-Luc Godard.

Jean-Luc Godard has always had a quiet interest in the relationship between his politics and the space they inhabit.  The topographies of modernity coinciding with his political questioning of capitalism occurs in films such as Tout Va Bien (1972), La Chinoise (1967), and Weekend (1967) – looking in particular at a factory, an inner-city flat/Maoist commune, and a busy roadway .  These spaces have provided more … Continue reading Libidinal Circuits in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) – Jean-Luc Godard.

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