On a television interview conducted near the twilight of his life, Aldous Huxley articulated his belief that the fullness of human potentiality can be achieved within one’s lifetime – that the realization of an ideal eternal cognition can be accelerated through a cultivation of reason and virtue – in effect, that transcendence is within human […]
In December 1992, the US-proposed Operation: Restore Hope sought to secure Somalia’s food supply from warring factions through the deployment of security forces in conjunction with the ongoing UN humanitarian campaign to control the widespread crisis of the man-made famine – a volatile situation that soon became increasingly encumbered with the greater problem of controlling […]
On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive war against Syria, Jordan and Egypt in a six-day war that culminated with the country’s seizure of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, leading to the Israeli government’s continued, illegitimate military occupation in violation of the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242 that ordered its […]
On the surface, Jon Jost’s austere, somber, and uncompromisingly caustic improvisational rumination on the pall cast by the aftermath of 9/11 on the European consciousness, La Lunga Ombra seems an uncharacteristic departure from the intractable consciousness of middle America that pervade his early films – a post tragedy portrait that converges more towards claustrophobic, Bergmanesque […]
As much an elegy to film as it is a dissolution of romantic myth, Jon Jost’s Paris-set digital feature, Oui Non hews closely to the spirit of Jean-Luc Godard’s late period, mixed media essay films – a reflection on the city and the cinema through conventional images of the present as preconceived, idealized evocations of […]
An unhurried, almost soporific succession of long and medium establishing shots of a bucolic logging town in the Pacific Northwest provides an entrancing and deceptively tranquil prelude to the impending – and perhaps, unavoidable – tragedy of The Bed You Sleep In. As the film opens, an unassuming, middle-aged, independent contractor named Ray Weiss (Tom […]