Last 4.5+ first viewings = Favorite Films
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Dossier 51 1978
Somewhere in Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell argues that film scholars often make the mistake of conflating the spatial perspective of the camera with the subjective point of view of a character who occupies that position. The problem with doing this is that character subjectivity is bound up with our larger sense of a character’s beliefs and desires, and so attributing an intention to them on the basis of their literal field of vision is liable to work only…
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Benediction 2021
With this fine film now in theatres, I thought I'd post my review here from Cinema Scope 89.
Artist biopics often entail a kind of contradiction. On the one hand, they study a historical individual, subject to the exigencies of the body and the contingencies of circumstance, while, on the other, they examine the subject’s art, which, qua art, must be understood in relation to an imaginative, and not strictly material, universe. By collapsing these distinct domains of inquiry, artist…
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After Earth 2013
In the absence of the overt spirituality that often textures Shyamalan’s oeuvre, we find what is perhaps the director’s most explicitly philosophical work: a film that examines how worldviews function at the most immediate level of perception and action, and how metaphysics change our understanding of raw affect and thus how we respond to it. It’s quite simple: we have a story reduced to a template, a problem, and from this, we observe two approaches trying to solve it.
In…
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Asako I & II 2018
Excerpted from my Cinema Scope piece:
"By far the most surprising and satisfying selection of this year’s Cannes Competition, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Asako I & II sets up and throws out stylistic paradigms faster than you can grab hold of them. As if to maximize the frustration of viewers who prefer to distinguish the fantastic from the “real,” Hamaguchi’s amorphous aesthetic—blending naturalistic and affected performances, unobtrusive and flashy editing—renders inseparable inner and outer and public and private forms of experience. Where Asako’s…
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