In spite of the unending calamity of the 2020s, films, books and television have still kept me going throughout 2022. Here are my highlights. Film Throughout the period of December 2021 to December 2022, I’ve watched just over 270 films. In general, I’ve focussed on my usual deep dive into the handful of national cinemas that I’m really invested in, though this year has seen … Continue reading 2022 Review
2021 has been a strange year. I’ve found it harder than 2020, in spite of getting more work and generally doing more things as we (briefly) returned to normal. It still just didn’t sit right. Perhaps it was simply because my previous years have been focussed around big projects coming out like book releases and this year was characterised by sitting on one until its … Continue reading 2021 Review
This article was originally commissioned as part of an ongoing series for Little White Lies. As the photograph was damaged by rain, and not wanting to revisit to re-do the photograph, the article is published here. Further installments of the column are ongoing and can be read here. One of the great screen presences of cinema’s Golden Age, Jean Simmons forged a strong career on … Continue reading Beginnings: Jean Simmons
In what has undoubtedly been a cursed year, I have been thankfully kept sane by a number of things, namely films and books but also a few other outlets of frustration. Suffice to say, when you’re taking solace from a hobby for which the tagline is ‘In the grim darkness of far future, there is only war’, you can bet it has been a pretty … Continue reading 2020 Review
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)
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 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)
It is fifty years ago this September since 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 into which she has locked herself, taping the gaps in the door and windows ready for … Continue reading An Exhaustive List of Nothing and Everything in Chantal Akerman’s Saute Ma Ville (1968)
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)
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
Celluloid Wicker Man 