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Phantom Thread 2017
Telling moment at the beginning when Reynolds takes the photo of his mother out of Alma’s hands (but shot ever so subtly). If Alma is the spirit or soul of the house (and I have read Spenser as Anderson evidently has too), then Anderson’s tension stresses the difference between spirit and body. In the film this manifests as the divorce between the mother figure every boy hallucinates and idealizes, and the difficulty or pain of having to accept that mother…
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To Die For 1995
Interesting that the strive for tv stardom is positioned as a threat to the domestic, yet tv was perhaps the ultimate purveyor of the enforced status quo, domestic or otherwise.
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Riefenstahl 2024
To me, it is incontestable that Riefenstahl’s films helped promote Nazi ideology and, thus, are accountable in some part for the holocaust. At the same time, however, it is also incontestable to me that there are moments in her films that comprise the apotheosis of cinema. What these two opinions have to do with each I’m not entirely sure nor do I ever think I will be entirely sure I understand the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Certainly Riefenstahl goes…
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The Brutalist 2024
A bit of a confused film. The epilogue, and of course the film has an epilogue, is entirely unnecessary as we are already informed of the political ambitions of Laszlo’s projects earlier in the film (and I must add it is a strong argument for politics as affirmation of life via creation of apolitical permanent artifice). Thus the disconcerting tonal whiplash of the epilogue can be avoided and we are left to ruminate on the light of the cross which…
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