I am the fire upon the altar, I am the sacrificial butter
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One Way Passage 1932
I thought, watching this rarest of masterpieces, of all things, about DH Lawrence's avowed hatred of movies.
I thought he might have liked One Way Passage. It is a truly Dionysian film; not Dionysian in the sense of outwardly expressed force and violence, but rather in the sense of (as Nietzsche said in his later preface to the Gay Science) making of life "light and flame."
I think this film may have the most beautiful depiction of heterosexual love in…
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Mulholland Drive 2001
I think this is what Poe wanted the detective story to be: an unending proliferation and repetition of significant bound under the strength of their own internal logic. Ratiocination provided a cover, a way of presenting the secret logic of the dream to light; but what truly drew the father of the modern mystery to his subject was the power of infinite suggestion and significance bound by "the rules of the game" -- the arbitrary yet binding integrity common to…
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McCabe & Mrs. Miller 1971
Altman’s film — like the best films of Ford and Capra, as well as those of his great contemporary Cassavetes — fits into a distinctly American imaginary (think Melville, Mark Twain, Poe, even minor figures like Ambrose Bierce or Stephen Crane) of an atomized individual caught in an external order against which their fugitive individuality is doomed to be destroyed. You might define these orders rationally, as “fate” or some such thing (the eventual destiny of Altman’s figure may easily…
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Megalopolis 2024
I think someone explained Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition to Francis and he thought it was The Fountainhead as an Aaron Sorkin script and then decided it needed to be ludicrously Italian.
It's objectively very bad, but fudge it, I had a great time. I would so much rather prestige film look like this than something like those dreadful Mia Goth films (yes they are middlebrow prestige films) that just gesture endlessly to themselves as productions of culture like Rameau's fucking Nephew (see the Phenomenology of the Spirit). So spaketh my Schellingite mind
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