Through a Glass Darkly, 1961

Four people emerge from the austere horizon, heading for the shore of a seemingly desolate island: a successful writer, David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), his adolescent son, Minus (Lars Passgard), his fragile daughter, Karin (Harriet Andersson), and Karin’s husband, Martin (Max von Sydow). Surrounded by her family, Karin is brought to the remote island in order to […]

Patrick Bokanowski: Short Films (1972-1994)

My first exposure to French filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski’s experimental cinema was with his transfixing, yet vague and impenetrable magnum opus L’Ange, a Dante Alighieri-esque depiction of intranscendence and moribund ritual that would ingrain the (somewhat reductive) idea that his films were abstract visual studies in structuralism, modulation, and repetition. In hindsight, underneath this cursory first […]