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
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
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)
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).
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.
The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972) is a perfect example of a narrative film fragmenting into surreal dreamscapes. From its title alone, Luis Buñuel’s obvious target is middle-class idolatry but, for a film full of incredibly stark images, there is one visual motif which stands out from the other surrealist political attacks. Discreet is punctuated, whether in dreams or reality (or perhaps both), by … Continue reading The Nowhere Road in The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972)
Celluloid Wicker Man 