Valentin de las Sierras (by charles de zohiloff)
Posted 1 day ago
MH I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it’s totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That’s been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable. Truthfully, reality is not transportable or explicable. In literature, it’s something that has been accepted by everyone, but in the movies, we are always four steps back. It’s not surprising that we are in this position, because it’s a reassuring point of view for the public and with it one can make a lot of money. But if you consider cinema as art, then you have to be a little bit more concrete and realistic.
BOMB Magazine: Michael Haneke by Lawrence Chua
Posted 4 days ago
The deranged revue becomes a vehicle for Gabbo’s insanity as he hallucinates Otto dancing, surrounded by chorus girls in chicken costumes. Carrying the battered dummy upside-down by one leg, he has an onstage breakdown and is promptly fired. The film ends with a depressing shot of Gabbo watching as his name is taken down from the theater’s marquee—immediately followed by a reprise of the upbeat music from the revue, a sign of either cruelty or obliviousness on the part of the filmmakers, whose aim in this weird production is impossible interpret. Sadly, it was the first but not the last film to cast Stroheim in the humiliating role of a rejected has-been.
Erich Von Stroheim retro at Film Forum (thru Jul 30) — altscreen.com — Readability
Posted 4 days ago
We are now entering the second decade of the twenty-first century, with a Ph.D. in fine arts looming in the horizon, ready to complicate things more, to add more debt burden. Had our society remained increasingly homogeneous and affluent, we would not have noticed this critical state of affairs. But the MFA industry is saturated: There are few new jobs and very low salaries to whatever is offered. As with the residential real estate mortgage credit bubble, the art program tuition credit bubble is bursting. Politicians are even talking about the unimaginable: forgiving excessive student loan burden. Our entire economy is in crisis, and no matter what you hear and read, this is not a passing recession. Regardless, what we need culturally from artists lies beyond the hermetic academic cloister. This is the end of an era, and things need to change fast.
Throwing the Gauntlet @ Art Programs « DIS Magazine
Posted 4 days ago
Reygadas: It is very subconscious. It’s like with a football player. Try asking him: ‘How do you do it?’ He won’t be able to name every stage of his decisive process, it’s very instinctive. It just comes to him, like it does to me. Think: Zinedine Zidane, great player. Do you think that before every attempt to shoot he processes the whole procedure in his head, like: ‘This kick is going to be a little bit of Pelé -style with a tiny touch of Maradona?’ No. He just does it thanks to his natural talent and the support of his experience, trained body, bone structure, muscle memory, the way he looks at life… I make films very instinctively, having in mind things I want to share. Post tenebras lux took me two days to write, however thinking about it lasted over two years… maybe not thinking, as this is a conscious process. I’d rather say it built up inside, without me even being fully aware of it. Then it just came out and flew. I trust that if I like something and feel it, some other people might feel the same way.
Reygadas Finds Himself in not so Silent a Light – Fandor - Essential films. Instantly!
Posted 4 days ago
The perverse truth about this compounded misery was that, in impulse if not in execution, Larkin was a modernist. His ‘common sense’ told him that, stripped of its myths and illusions, life was a senseless decline towards death. It was the same insight that modernism confronted. But the modernists had tried to stitch the culture back together in the light of this sense of meaninglessness. For Larkin, this was an obscurantist futility. The ‘truth’ lay in an ordinary, universal suffering of banal frustrations occasionally illuminated by shafts of an entirely unconvincing transcendence.
Posted 4 days ago
