What I love most about Kurosawa’s recent work, what makes him so modern, is his mutability — how his shifts in perspective can reveal worlds unseen as much as they can restructure narratives and recast characters. In Cloud, the victims of business and the digital space become vengeful ghosts, and the violence of commerce is traded for bullets and blades. Identity is something amorphous here, betraying the immediacy of in-person interaction as opposed to the internet’s anonymity, Kurosawa’s characters exist…

Armond White recently wrote a short essay objecting to the omission of Riefenstahl's Olympic documentaries from TCM's curation of Olympic-themed movies. I doubt many of us, especially here on letterboxd, would agree to this avoidance of these infamous yet significant works of art. But, White, as per usual, cloaks his praise of politically suspect movies in the guise of "universal themes" and "pure aestheticism"—the language of the critic unwilling or unable to deal with the fact that the work of…

The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived is one of those films, beamed from the edge of the world maybe—the beginning of a story which is also, sadly, the end of a story; radical, forged in desperation, yet resolute against the world. The stated mission of the film's subjects is revolution, but what this exactly means is not something we can take as self-evident. Indeed, I think it necessary to make the complaint that their application of certain Marxian categories to…

Bresson’s cinema, and his later work in particular, belongs to that intersection of Kant and Spinoza which would later give us those thinkers like Nietzsche, Deleuze, etc. It is the revaluation of the old philosophical question of why for the sake of the how which seeks process and affectivity, denying intellect its tendency to tyranny and overestimation. Perhaps naturally we seek causes in the everyday things we encounter; we are not wrong to do so but our mistake is made…

In traditional Japanese aesthetics the notion of the “cut” [kire, 切れ] is actualised in a variety of their arts as the expression of the Zen principle that seeing into one’s nature, their fundamental being, can only be realised after having “cut off the root of life”, that is severed it from the place and temporality it’s “at home” in. Within the art of ikebana (flower arrangement), the Kyoto school philosopher Keiji Nishitani discusses this as such:

The essential difference [between…

As with any project approximating this kind of approach to a politico-historical theme, there is a selection of material here that necessarily chooses certain things while leaving other things out. Obviously, there is thus a danger of misrepresentation in how this theme—only ever something partial—is represented as relating to the social totality. This series discusses the failures of revolutionary movements and the destruction of gains made by the labour movements in the West which led to the extension of the…

A Few Tendentious, Tractarian Observations on Montage

A moment in Potemkin bears the mark of what would later become for Eisenstein the so-called "intellectual montage", or what I will here call, for analytic purposes, the "speculative montage". Hair almost ablaze, the priest aboard the ship is the first character of the film who, in his universality, as far as he is the embodiment of the Church and orthodox theology, presents a 'picture' of the institution and ideology in its social…

I don't know how many of you have worked a desk job in your life, but there are few things as mind-numbing as inputting data, sitting at a computer with several of those old fluorescent lights surely too bright and harsh to be legal by health and safety standards hanging over your head all day and slowly transmitting unto you a headache redoubled by the shit you have to take speaking to the bureaucratic machine of big companies for far…

"He's a businessman, not an enemy."

Like all of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's best films, the transformations that this narrative undergoes operate as if the central character's perceptions of the conflicts around them have been extended into the form of the film itself. What struck me most immediately about this work was its interest in the conflict between cosmopolitan business interests—always seeking to supersede state boundaries and borders—and the interests of the nation-state, tied inextricably to a sense of irrationalism, which are…

What makes this film a work of realism? We should not try to locate the reason in the mannerisms of the actors, nor the style with which it has been shot and directed, but rather with the mode of representation that brings to light, or expresses, the affections that determine "attitudes, or types of behaviour" in an environment. When Bazin spoke of neorealism as the comportment of Rossellini's direction, then, how we must understand this is as an aesthetic and…

Supposedly, myths were originally tied to the stars and their constellations, stories we wove over millennia into the tapestry of the universe through ritual and art, before later becoming agricultural in nature. For Markopoulos, myth belongs to a different kind of star, that is, the celebrity or icon. But, more importantly, myth and its contents, although speaking of the divine, unveils something unmistakably and terribly human — that which spills out of self knowledge and the bite of the apple,…

No new release has shocked me more (and grown on me more) so far this year than David Fincher’s odd follow-up to one of his (and the year’s) worst films. Indeed, I never believed Fincher had it in him to make something quite so conscious. And although that may be largely due to the source material that I’ve never read, I don’t wish to understate the extent to which his own hand played a role in crafting something so interesting,…