The problem with Cargo 200, in a sentence: it wants to maintain the shocking locus of the film as both a thematically coherent linchpin of events, characters, narrative strands, etc. and as a decidedly “meaningless,” shocking violence that cannot be articulated, grasped, or accounted for “finally” by the film in which it appears. Accordingly, the [...]
After having established the “determinate functioning” and systematic appearance of the Cecafumo cityscape shot in relation to the narrative of Mamma Roma – “The shot is inserted each time Mamma Roma or Ettore begins or concludes a line of action meant to improve his or her social position” (116) – Rhodes now argues the opposite, [...]
While doing research on Tarkovsky’s film Stalker I came across this titillating Chicago Review article by Stan Brakhage (as told to Jennifer Dorn) that recounts their amusing encounter at the 1983 Telluride Film Festival. Brakhage Meets Tarkovsky
Amid growing international concern over the India-Israel arms trade, the Israeli firm Rafael unveiled the below marketing video — described by Stephen Trimble of The Dew Line as a “catastrophic collision of Bollywood and the arms industry” - at the Aero India 2009 defense convention in Bangalore. In the months since its posting, the video has become the [...]
Though the main fixtures of a classic, Hollywood film are conspicuously absent – narrative, sequential time, protagonist – it would be a mistake to describe Terence Davies’ film as experimental. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) does not, after all, revel in its play with filmic form: it does not push the limits of film language [...]
I love the idea that our everyday world is overlaid with (or better yet, haunted by) a vibrant, fictive universe of characters and storylines, spin-offs and syndications. And so, apparently, does Dan Meth, whose Pop-Cultural Charts series maps much more than the geography of TV sitcoms. These maps are also, to be sure, a blueprint for the [...]
Ever since Ken Hudson Campbell, playing a jaded but well-meaning Santa (-in his first role, it turns out), put out his butt and pulled up his beard to accommodate one last request (in Home Alone of course), I, and perhaps every adult American my age, have been uniquely attuned to Hollywood’s penchant for ironizing — prematurely, [...]
Every Valentine’s Day, it seems, we are subjected to the same old top ten lists and gushing silver screen memorials to the greatest, most memorable kisses to light up the screen. Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Titanic, and now Spiderman and Brokeback Mountain are the familiar finalists — but none, I think, compare to that of The [...]
David Kishik of Notes from the Coming Community (and author of Wittgenstein’s Form of Life) has up on his blog two music videos mashed-up by the video artist Kutiman (aka Israeli musician Ophir Kutiel). But in what way, exactly, are Kutiman’s works mashups? The prevailing theories — Vague Terrain, Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory, the whole remix/copyleft [...]
Who knew that between his early run of physical comedies — What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), Sleeper (1973) — and his long run of New York dramatic comedies — beginning with Annie [...]
Documents & Studies