There are so many strong images in the first section – especially all the stuff on SD video, revelatory, the footage from Unknown Pleasures, my God – that for me it emphasised the brochure quality that crept into Jia's filmmaking. This is not a dichotomy that could survive semiotic rectitude, but my spontaneous feeling was of going from a camera that looks at things to a camera that, more and more, is saying: look at this. I didn't like anything…

'I asked Pascal to summarize it for me. I wanted only to have the outline of the story and of the characters, that’s all.'

'I believe that it is indeed the most elliptical of all my movies.'

'This movie belongs to a category of movies that people like or do not like.'

Rivette wondered why nobody had filmed Wuthering Heights with teenagers, and then extracted from it an idea fundamental to Jean Renoir, described by Tag Gallagher as 'combinations of…

In the Anglosphere especially, departments have been replaced by schools and centres in many institutions. Leaving externally-funded centres aside, these schools don’t shelter a single discipline, but rather contain various ‘programs’ or post-disciplines, often brought together higgedly piggedly. Indeed in this structure the humanities themselves become a ‘meta-discipline’ rather than a collection of disciplines. More and more often, people say, ‘we’re in the humanities’ not ‘we’re in history’ or ‘in philosophy’ etc. Pedagogically, courses are no longer conceived in terms…

A really awful, morose, childish film with no idea how to do what it wants to do, which wouldn’t be worth doing anyway. I would really like to get something out of one of these BFI funded debuts, but a film like this (or Hoard from last year) has so little to do with any kind of reality, let alone the questions of representation, structure, dramaturgy and mise en scène that we would expect serious cinema to engage with at…

Peckinpah at his best — a ‘flat’ immersion in an environment and milieu without any lead-in or really any interest in dynamics in any normal sense, but shot and edited at the speed of thought and feeling — the slightly jarring zooms, the strange melancholy of the long lens shots, the way those flashback shots are intercut when Junior first sees the bull, the parade/riding sequence. Peckinpah often feels like an epitome of what ‘New Hollywood’ ought to have been…

The problem with films like this is that they want to be assembled out of episodes that convey the social theme (so: co-worker suicide, humiliating performance bonus, financial embarrassment, delayed emotional breakdown at inopportune moment) but they also want to avoid the feeling of connected incident that characterises a traditional plot because of their aspiration to a ‘pure’ observation that avoids the sense of an authorial hand to preserve the contingency of the real. So they end up in an…

One can only intrigue the spectator if one is intrigued oneself, and one must only pose the questions that one first asks oneself, whose answers remain unknown; but perhaps posing them in turn is itself the answer: the expression of the enigma, without resolving it, brings it peace; it becomes a visible enigma—in short, it finds its meaning as an enigma by perpetuating its function, by turning it into a statue. In this, it is completed and comes to rest—an…