A variation on the "it is happening again" scene from Twin Peaks.

Seen on the Criterion Channel

Love seeing the beginnings of a great long-term collaboration between an actor and a director.

Seen on the Criterion Channel

Language is unsettling.

Seen on the Criterion Channel

So this is where it all started.

Seen on the Criterion Channel

Do you think that if you were falling in space that you would slow down after awhile or go faster and faster?

Faster and faster. And for a long time you wouldn't feel anything. And then you'd burst into fire. Forever. And the angels wouldn't help you, because they've all gone away.

Except an angel did appear to catch her, even if it didn't save her from dying. A film whose dreaminess is more than a "vibe," more than a demonstration of aesthetic beauty. It's the stylistic embodiment of a girl stranded between the horrific life she has to face and her own private sadness, the part of her that no one else is allowed to see. Julee Cruise sings "Questions in a World of Blue" to no one but Laura, her mirror image in appearance and words. It's that brief moment where Laura cries to herself before inviting the men to her table. Like Donna, we are privy to this, aware that something is wrong but afraid to plunge into the true depth of that void, helpless in our lack of understanding. Everyone is either so helpless or cruel in this world, and a girl died because of it. I feel guilty for only being able to write in generalities, to wave my pen in broad strokes. Perhaps it's natural for a filmmaker who felt genuinely cosmic, who made the torment of individuals feel like the tragedies of entire galaxies. It makes me want to cross that barrier of fear, to stop another girl from dying while she is still here on this planet.

Rest in peace David. Thank you for everything.

The tragedy of the archetypal Fordian hero doubling as the tragedy of liberal tolerance. Judge Priest's mediating tendencies have more tact than those of Ford's other idealists, but the end result is more or less the same. He reunited a family, gave a sex worker a dignified funeral procession, stopped a black boy from being lynched, and yet he retreats into his home alone, clinging to his bottles of alcohol. And for what? There is a parade celebrating his election victory where, despite the unity shown earlier at the funeral, is still segregated by gender, race, class and political loyalties, a curtain call operating on the basis of separate but equal.

The lines and vectors we've already seen in Wagon Master, formed by similarly large waves of roaming people, are separate from Judge Priest himself, who remains static. And in an inverse of the ending of The Searchers, he doesn't walk through a doorway into the ambiguities of an open landscape, but withdraws into the certain death of his private home. It might as well be a coffin, just as it is at the end of Dreyer's Gertrud.

It is here that the three distinct planes of depth in Ford's compositions find their most eerie expression. The middle plane, where Ford usually stages his action, is transformed into a ghostly passageway. A light mysteriously shuts off as Judge Priest passes through, as though the universe itself knew that he would condemn himself to the farthest most plane, to being a murky fixture of the backdrop.

How telling that the film ends at night. The sun doesn't shine bright on this border state.

Seen on my computer

Quite tedious but I do like cartoon noises and women in cowboy outfits.

Seen on Tubi

In Adam's Rib we shift from a clear case of depiction to a position in which it is ambiguous whether we are meant to understand the film as depicting or as projecting the film it contains. This is as explicit an acknowledgement of the medium of film as the related shift in Man with a Movie Camera, but what it acknowledges, when it is expressed, may be, however close in manifest technique, unpredictably distant in latent content. In Adam's Rib the acknowledgment of the nature of movies is a route for acknowledging the reality of its actors.

- Stanley Cavell

Perhaps the most emblematic of these comedies of remarriage, an impressive and intertwining game of constant reversals, between men and women, between spirit and law, between public and private. The theater stage title card should be our first clue to this game, a promise that everything we will be seeing is tinged with sheer performance. Acting in a courtroom, acting in one's own home movie where documentary and silent film find their shared history, being abstracted by the newspapers into cartoon caricatures. The use of long takes demonstrates an intense dedication to the sanctity of an untouched performance, allowed to play out with darting eyes and subtle shifts in expression.

Adam and Amanda wield these public displays to affirm a private agreement, the spirit of a marriage residing in the sharing of principles. They need to know that such a tacit understanding, long taken for granted, stands up to the light of social scrutiny. And yet, even within these settings, whether it's the screening room or the courtroom, Adam and Amanda find their own private spheres, a look from under the projector or the table, a place to demonstrate that they're still in on this together. In an even more radical gesture, Amanda reveals the courtroom itself to be a private sphere that needs to be opened up to the social world, enforcing an understanding that the law cannot be hermetically sealed from human life. We as the audience are a part of this public. How curious that when Amanda speaks to the jury, we sometimes don't get a reverse shot.

The distinction between the spirit and law of marriage becomes a distinction between true intimacy and a sense of private ownership, implied in the contract that Adam invokes so passionately. And the former can only be rediscovered through constant struggle, one that may now find itself in the midst of an election. But Cukor closes the curtains of the bed on us, in the same way that the theater curtains close at the end of a play. The performance for us is over for now. Some intimacies aren't for the world to see.

Seen on my computer

The active engagement in a relationship, even under the guise of ostensible play, is more meaningful than its stilted expression in documents and contracts. Even though the walls of Jericho have de facto been torn down, it is still necessary to engage in the ritual itself, to experience seeing that blanket fall, the lights dimming with it. The great pursuit of the comedy of remarriage, located in the attainability of shared habitation, has been realized.

Seen on my computer

Mnemosyne, Memory or Recollection, is the mother of the muse of the poet, the artist, and the philosopher. She is their access to primordial wisdom, knowledge of the whole. All three may hear her voice and express her wisdom in their own ways.

- Glenn Alexander Magee

Don't you understand that humans, every human, is born in that swamp of blood? And that the sacred and divine accompany you also in bed, in the field, in front of the fire? Every gesture you make repeats a divine model. Day and night you haven't an instant, not even the most trifling, that does not gush from the silence of its source.

- Mnemosyne

The miracle of the encounter is this paradoxical conjunction between the pure exterior – a person whom I encounter – and pure interiority – the consequences that I must draw by myself…

- Alain Badiou

As Tag Gallagher posits, the film's one true encounter is its fourth episode, the only one where a god and a mortal are shown to make contact. It's a perfect crystallization of the film's key through lines, concerned with the possibility of the divine and the earthly existing in the same realm, of opposing sides of a dialogue occupying the same frame, of daily banalities becoming an indication of humanity's cosmic destiny.

Rancière's claim that Straub-Huillet shifted towards a dispositif of agreement with From the Clouds to the Resistance, their first Pavese adaptation, is a provocative one. There is a partial formal case to be made in his favor. These Encounters of Theirs is defined by its two shots, where actors are leveled equally with each other and placed in close proximity, contrasting with the dramatic distances in staging in something like Antigone or Workers, Peasants. The use of camera tilting, particularly in the film's final shot, is a clear suggestion of the unity between heaven and earth.

But this agreement should not be taken as a foreclosure of discussion. Rather, per Badiou, the encounter between two distinct beings implies a certain openness, a semi-passive permissiveness towards what might come of this spontaneity, which then lends itself to an active process of construction and investigation. This is what Mnemosyne instructs Hesiod to do at the end of their dialogue. He must tell the other mortals what he knows, to continue the stream of perennial knowledge through a series of new dialogues so that countless others can have access to the wisdom that was there long before us. The presence of nature is our common wellspring, a primordial given that is not innocent but brutal and challenging.

Straub-Huillet return to the form of the dialogue with Pavese precisely because it is contingent and imprecise, a medium of exchange without a fixed destination, where the planes of speech and gesture are made equivalent. It parallels their desire to navigate a post-Soviet communism that rejects what they view as productivist. Here is where I lean towards Daniel Fairfax's response to Rancière. There is no necessary antagonism between Marxism and an ecological communism. As plenty of recent scholarship has demonstrated, such ecological strands are already an essential component of Marx's political project. We are thus left not to choose a side but to zig-zag, to return to the perennial knowledge within Marx as a corrective to everything that his since followed, an encounter with the past that will serve as the basis for many encounters of the future.

Seen on my computer

Robert Eggers should be so fucking happy that Lily-Rose Depp has a lesbian boyfriend because it is the real reason I sat my ass down three times for this shit.

Seen at AMC Lincoln Square 13 in New York City

This is gay. I haven't showered in two days.

Seen on Tubi

The sheer brutality on display is astonishing.

Seen on YouTube

Proto-Mulholland Drive. Errol Flynn shade made me laugh.

Seen on my computer

Tashi Duncan taught me how to fujo out.

Seen on my friend’s TV

Découpage creates continuity, assembly leaves a gap. This is why Griffith’s crosscutting is assembly, switching between events in different spaces, but his scene conception is découpage: it takes a unified space apart and puts it back together seamlessly.

- Timothy Barnard

It's almost too fitting that I watched this so soon after watching Straub-Huillet's Workers, Peasants. Their decision to bookend that film with massive panning shots of empty landscapes finds its origin here. They are the only two such shots in the whole film, otherwise defined by Griffith's usual toolkit of wide static shots and crosscutting, an indication of his profound formal economy. The opposition between familial and professional obligations is formed through simple match-cutting, while the in-between traveling shots are gradually more and more truncated. By the time we get to the third or fourth variation, Griffith radically excises his découpage. There is a growing urgency and painful familiarity to where this is all heading. The bookending panning shots are thus revealed to be the ultimate contrast of a film defined by such oppositions. An absent landscape waiting to be filled becomes a landscape returned to absence, the shot moving in reverse, refocusing us towards the land that will now take this child, its scarcity the greatest of horrors and irrationalities. And, as Jon so perceptively notes, it is only by overcoming such rural idiocy and inefficiency through the modern technological unity of montage that a better structure of life is possible. The Country Doctor does precisely what its titular character cannot. This is film operating as an industrial art, articulating the broader implications of the historical epoch that birthed it.

Seen on YouTube

Dude had girls throwing themselves at him and he magically fumbled all of them. Has crash zooms and erratic editing that is very contemporary to now, not always in a way that I like. But I laughed!

Seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City

To hear the painter’s protest (against the institutions and the academic art forms) in the Louvre itself would be the perfect example of the "Straubian fantasy: a state radio that speaks Brecht" (Serge Daney). The paint and words that form this visit’s material are the soil from which Straub and Huillet unearth Cézanne’s anger. Bemoaning that France was hiding these treasures, Cézanne told Gasquet: "Let’s set fire to the Louvre...right away," recalling these other words that Straub often quoted: "Look at this mountain, once it was fire."

- Antoine Thirion

Seen on my computer

The musicality of the spoken word in Straub-Huillet's work made explicit.

Seen on my computer

Might just be the low resolution of the copy I have but I feel like all the ants disappeared.

Seen on my computer

Cut out the dialogue scenes from this and you can form a landscape film of sorts. Even with wonderful moments of individual romance and conflict, this is a film primarily attuned to the lines of people and horses that cross these vast landscapes, mass formations that move in unison. Unity is forged through song, allowing those honorable members of the margin to triumph over violent outlaws. Not exactly a concrete vision of the future but the promise of something better, the eternal struggle for harmony over antagonism stretching far into the horizon.

Seen on my computer

The senselessness of property ownership against those who actually work, the opposition between sheer labor power and technological advancement, the birthing pains of a new republic. Will the people have the means of survival? There is a long silence, slowly overtaken by the sound of birds. Everyone is still scrambling around like those ants on the ground.

Seen on my computer

The sounds of birds, bugs and chickens are all a part of this modern chorus of the working class.

Seen on my computer

The perfect alchemical union, like seeing light and shadow for the first time again. Everyday minutiae is granted the power of world-historic grandeur through visual abstraction. Every shift in sunlight among the trees and through the windows guides us into the torrent pace of an unrecognizable river. The image flips and shadows become the objects themselves, as if there were no difference between the sun and the earth it graces. The chime of the cosmic clock slows down and then speeds up again in reverse, rejecting linearity in favor of the ebb and flow that history embodies. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes, almost couldn’t believe that I was experiencing this.

Seen at the New York Public Library in New York City in 16mm

Deeply unsettling in its superimpositions and how it scans across a still image. I felt trapped in these shadowy halls and churches, constrained by the jittery frame rate that prevents complete movement, where only flames await on the open landscapes.

Seen at the New York Public Library in New York City in 16mm

A fairytale, with all its intrigues and pitfalls.

Seen at the New York Public Library in New York City in 16mm

So profoundly despairing. The tension that structures the film is one between the innocence of memory and the brutality of reality, and as much as the persistent voiceover tries to convince us otherwise, it's readily apparent that we are witnessing pure destruction, a family and town falling apart in every conceivable way.

How disturbing and grotesque it is that our main character, the only viewpoint we have into this world, refuses to grow up, both spiritually and physically. After all the marriages and deaths and wage cuts, his brothers can still sling him on their shoulders. Never mind that key characters seemingly disappear for extensive periods of time, their struggles and torments entirely out of our view. Hell, we're introduced to this family as if they were given facts, a natural part of the scenery, devoid of much interiority beyond what we're occasionally allowed to glimpse.

The truth is that no one has liberated the world with truth. Despite Gruffydd's tender words, Huw has not heard or understood anything. He is trapped in delusions entirely of his own making, predicated on a pastor's failed attempts at preserving a false social unity between those who represent authority and those who fight for liberty and change. Even as the world moves around him, Huw can only imagine staying at the dinner table and working in the mines, his education be damned.

The film's concluding idyllic fantasy is ultimately unfulfilling. A series of crosscuts never reaches the final anticipated master shot, where Huw and his father can cross the editing junction to reunite with his brothers. The family that never spoke at dinner is denied its reconciliation in the afterlife. Heaven can't make up for lost words on earth.

So, to answer the title's question: no, it was never all that green, except in his own imagination.

Seen on my computer

A lament indeed. Texture and its inverse, its absence, blotted with shadows. The images aren't pristine, immediately identifiable, and their relations even less so. It's a question but not a secret.

Seen on Plex

The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor.

- Karl Marx

Unless the actor is satisfied to be a parrot or a monkey he must master our period's knowledge of human social life by himself joining in the war of the classes. Some people may feel this to be degrading, because they rank art, once the money side has been settled, as one of the highest things; but mankind's highest decisions are in fact fought out on earth, not in the heavens; in the 'external' world, not inside people's heads. Nobody can stand above the warring classes, for nobody can stand above the human race.

- Bertolt Brecht

The radical political democracy of the past as the stage for the radical artistic democracy of the present. La Commune (Paris, 1871) denies us the fluidity of historical recreation, always interrupting performances with self-reflection, interjecting counter-explanations into scenes, interspersing black frames among every shot. For six hours, we are forced to think relentlessly, to feel the blood in our veins.

Long live the Social Republic, the one we had and the one we will have.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City

We wound up with a cinema of time, where nothing exists except for the pure duration of successive acts without density or reality: the birth of the dangerous, and entirely gratuitous, notion of rhythm and speed—trying to throw us off track by replacing existence and presence by accumulation, hoping to create a prey from the frenzied multiplication of fleeing shadows...We’re suffering from suffocation, from rhetorical intoxication.

- Jacques Rivette

A film that only seems to understand meaningless accumulation, deforming itself into an endless mechanical procession of musical crescendos, jump scares and gesticulating bodies masquerading as performances, where the acrobatics of a long take annihilate any real sense of space, any possibility of the spontaneity that characterizes existence.

This is what I meant when I called the film a toy box in my previous review. It’s a closed object, embalmed in plastic, more concerned about landing in the exact right place than constructing a compelling sequence of images and interactions. A film about death need not be dead itself.

If there’s anything that I have gained from watching this a second time, it’s a clarification of what now interests me in film. There is value in ordering and constructing space through different camera placements and cutting. More fundamentally, a film about the past or things that never even happened is still a film about the present, for film is an art of the material present, real actors standing on real ground, as a bloviating Aaron Taylor-Johnson might say. No such thing exists here, in this coffin of the cinematic arts.

Seen at AMC Empire 25 in New York City in IMAX

Opens with one of those classic Straub-Huillet panning shots, by now a clear indication that something is to be conjured from and confronted with in the empty landscape, a preview for what the words and actors will make explicit. And they bring a similar shot back at the very end, turning bookend into reminder, telling us that it is impossible to think of these desolate hills as separate from people, separate from history.

Everything in between unfolds as a double progression, both of the drama at hand and the cinematic methods used to articulate it. The camera pans between different groups of actors, before deciding to simply cut between the two. There are sometimes wides and sometimes close-ups, the framing either center or off-center. The actors may decide to take the script out from behind their back, reading their lines with their heads down, or to rely upon memory and proclaim every syllable into the sky. Who knows if their recollection failed them or if Straub-Huillet directed them to look at the script anyway. Once in a while, they throw a real formal shock, an abrupt cutting of a line, an extended pause, a dramatic shift in angle, a sound bridge, a character walking offscreen instead of staying statuesque. And, of course, there's a sudden change in exposure, the sun making its unavoidable presence all the more noticeable.

With every Straub-Huillet film I gain a better understanding of what it means to view cinema as an art of concrete signs, resistant to formulas and "grammars." Every shot is a tombstone constructed with life, a perfect synthesis of the past and its recreation on present ground.

Seen on Plex

Straub-Huillet make their statements visually more than verbally. At the end of Sicilia!, says Straub, "One gets the impression of two people who say goodbye from either side of an invisible abyss – they’re almost two John Ford characters."

In fact, the abyss is visible. Because of the Straubs’ choice of aperture and focus, the hero stands outside Sicilian space, as he has all through the movie. The effect is as though he is standing outside the movie, looking at the screen.

- Tag Gallagher

A goodbye suspended in midair.

Seen on YouTube

Love all the pauses.

Seen on YouTube

This engraving is a visual expression of the kind of outlook which John Dee summed up in his Monas hieroglyphica, a combination of Cabalist, alchemical, and mathematical disciplines through which the adept believed that he could achieve both a profound insight into the nature and vision of a divine world beyond nature.

- Frances A. Yates

Time for me to conduct a proper study of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment.

Seen on YouTube

Wish I got to make graphs like this in college.

Seen on YouTube

The obstetric opening shot hurls us into a hell of one man's languor and loneliness. He is completely out of place and time, out of sync with every person he encounters. Even the voiceover narration, delivered in gravelly second person, is denied to his personhood.

Seen on my computer

George Cukor knew exactly what us dykes wanted when he cast Katharine Hepburn as Jo March.

Seen on Apple TV

Stunned at how much I cried. There's a real logic of suspense that underlies how Hong constructs his scenes, which always make you anticipate a sudden reframing, a sudden rupture of emotion from beneath the concealing surface of calm niceties. But it's never a parlor trick, a pompous display of virtuosity. It's simply a mastery over the core principles of filmmaking, when to move and when to hold, when to cut and when to readjust. These characters transform in front of us because they must, because there is nothing else they could possibly do with these feelings and worries. We are treated to a process without dogma, an openness to where following through on a gesture can take us. It's the core of the film's most moving scene, among the most moving I've seen all year, where Chu Si-eon asks Jeon-im's students to declare who they want to be. How affecting it is to see an older man take so seriously the concerns and aspirations of a group of young women, to see him offer the space for their first steps in self-actualization. In his own way, Hong has done the same for me.

Seen on my computer

Nothing but defeats. This film is nothing but an accumulation of defeats...The camera is always on the move in the film; just like the people it moves round, it pretends that something is actually happening. In fact everything is so completely finished that everyone might as well give up and get themselves buried. The tracking shots in the film, the crane shots, the pans! Douglas Sirk looks at these corpses with such tenderness and radiance that we start to think that something must be at fault if these people are so screwed up and, nevertheless, so nice. The fault lies with fear and loneliness. I have rarely felt fear and loneliness so much as in this film.

- Rainer Werner Fassbinder

A film made with crankcase oil in its veins because the twentieth century left no other choice.

Seen on my computer

Thought we were going to watch Nathaniel Dorsky's Ember Days.

Seen on Tubi

A hideous bore. A passion project with no vision. On a scene-to-scene, shot-to-shot basis, it seems to have no idea what it wants to be. For all his virtuosic camera movement, Robert Eggers somehow manages to land on the same exact composition every single time. This a dusty toy box, not a film, a withering object protected from the sunlight of a person capable of thinking. I miss Anya Taylor-Joy.

Seen at AMC Empire 25 in New York City

The prototype for so much, from other films to how we interface with each other in a digital age. Merry Christmas to you all!

Seen on my friend’s TV

The machine is a sort of god; the persistence of the Chinese (and Gilhooley), despite the signs, indicates hope and stubbornness (traditional Fordian virtues). Oddly, Donovan has neither put the machine out of reach nor emptied its treasures; instead, he respects the laws of chance. The machine discharges because it is Christmas. All man’s most destructive and sadistic temptations may today be joyfully indulged as tolerable exercise of "liberty;" even the Lee Marvin character (whom Cluzeot calls a "devil" and whose haircut is indeed satanic) is tolerable; even the piano’s destruction can be condoned today.

- Tag Gallagher

The long movement towards social harmony in a place where everything is seemingly broken and segregated. Such fractures are part of the film's construction, decidedly imperfect in several of its individual shots and scenes, but transcendently so. The divine is everywhere in Donovan's Reef, and I have learned to heed its call.

Seen on my computer

My dear friend Lillian made a wonderful video essay about this film. Please watch it!

Seen at the Metrograph in New York City in 35mm

The simping is very understandable but unfortunately not all that electrifying until the ending. To no one's surprise, Garbo is incredible. Watch Gertrud instead.

Seen on my computer

When the lesbian sex goes so hard you have to be hospitalized.

Seen on my computer

Post-imperial crash out, returning to a home that doesn't feel like one at all, dusty and desolate from such high-contrast lighting. A rhythmically peculiar film, wedded together entirely by ellipses, where memories can suddenly reemerge with a simple cut. The past can't be all you have because it's something you will slowly start to lose. It's dramatic but not attention-seeking, jarring but not showy. Somehow, it hurts more this way.

Seen on the Criterion Channel

There are very few films I have loved like this one, very few sustained cinematic obsessions I've had like this one. I don't care how cringe or out of fashion it is to love Carol like this, it will always be special and perfect, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where I will venture, in heaven and in hell.

Seen at the Metrograph in New York City

One is forced also to contemplate Hepburn as a suitable life-partner for him. One can only feel uneasy, and question whether the triumph of total irresponsibility the film appears to be offering as fitting resolution is in fact acceptable. There is no sense of a possible synthesis or even compromise; the only alternative to Susan is made so ridiculous as to be instantly discounted.

- Robin Wood

This hero's entanglements with this Artemis from the beginning, and throughout, threaten the award of his imagined fortune, both because she compromises him in the eyes of those who are to award it and because she herself seeks the same million. Yet when at the conclusion she confers it upon him, together with all other treasures, he seems unsatisfied. He gets the money, the lost bone, and the girl, yet he is not happy. What can he, do we think, be thinking of? Why is he still rigid; why is his monstrous erection still false? Do we think: He cannot accept these powers from her, as if these things are her dowry, for in accepting her right to confer them he must accept her authority, her fatherhood of herself? Or do we think: He still cannot think about money any more than he can (or because he cannot) think about sexuality? Or is it: The fate of sexuality and the fate of money are bound together; we will not be free for the one until we are free from the other? Perhaps we shall think, for Luther's reasons, or for Marx's, or Freud's, that money is excrement. I find that I think again, and I claim that such comedies invite
us to think again, what it is Nietzsche sees when he speaks of our coming to doubt our right to happiness, to the pursuits of happiness.

- Stanley Cavell

The perfect predicament of a marriage of circumstance, where the playfulness of David and Susan's endless shenanigans entangles them in a seemingly primordial trajectory towards unavoidable romance. They reenact the games of an imagined, shared childhood as the basis for legitimacy in marriage, as though their lives had to lead to this point. The rigidities of city life in New York are put to the test by the unleashed id of rural Connecticut, a return to the "wild" that serves to reaffirm the value of organized existence. It's charming, no doubt, but also unsettling and deranged. David relents more than he consents, though in this world of unacknowledged double entendres it's almost impossible to really discern what anyone understands of themselves or each other. The senselessness of such a love is as confining as it is liberating.

Seen on my friend's projector

Resist the temptation for falling for the memory.

My path is always a new path.

Not that Iris is actually a good French teacher but maybe there is something to her method, an understanding that language finds its oxygen in a social context, the people we speak to and the signs we read. Words only mean anything to us if they're registered with a feeling or connected to an action. It's fitting for a character who seemingly appears and vanishes into thin air, a roaming figure with no clear past or future. But even chance encounters have their structuring repetitions, just as language does. There is another instrument to play, another poem to translate, another glass of makgeolli to drink.

Seen on my computer

But syntax and rhetoric, in film, are an artificial veneer thrown over the living, which escapes them, or which they paralyze, freeze, and kill: no Paulhan is conceivable here, where Terror alone is the law.

- Jacques Rivette

The image is a tomb for the eye. To see a film is to come before something that is already-seen [déjà-vu]. Something already seen by others: the camera, the auteur, the technicians, the first audience, the people in charge, sometimes even political figures, tyrants. And what is already seen [déjà-vu] is already enjoyed [déjà-joui].

- Serge Daney

Look at this mountain, once it was fire.

- Paul Cézanne

• The Kiss
• Man with a Movie Camera
• Limite
• Rose Hobart
• At Land
• Cluny Brown
• The Man I Love
• Awaara
• Johnny Guitar
• The Long Gray Line

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Carol
2. Song to Song
3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
4. A Ghost Story
5. The Social Network
6. Side Effects
7. La Cocina
8. Kubo and the Two Strings
9. Her
10. Una

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of films that influenced my most recent short film A Haunting of Past Ink (2023), some much more obvious than others. To anyone who knows me well, most of these choices are unsurprising. I very much view this short film as an articulation of where I am now artistically, which of course encompasses everything I've accumulated and learned from over the past several years.

I would also include a list of books and albums I read/listened to while making this film, but quite frankly I don't really remember any of them.

• First Reformed
• The Card Counter
• Memoria
• Syndromes and a Century
• Fireworks
• Tokyo Twilight
• An Autumn Afternoon
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire
• Mirror
• Werckmeister Harmonies

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.