There are people who, out of self-image, insecurity, or naive delusion that they can change another person, find themselves in doomed relationships. In Anatole Litvak’s Goodbye Again, Paula (the intoxicating Ingrid Bergman), a successful, middle-aged interior decorator, has been trapped in a dead-end relationship with Roger (Yves Montand), a philandering, transportation businessman. Commissioned to redecorate […]
In an incisive encounter in The Education of Shelby Knox, (then) high-school student Shelby from Lubbock – a devout, abstinent, southern Baptist, child of conservative Republicans, and fierce advocate for comprehensive sex education in the classroom as a means of curtailing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, stemming off widespread health misinformation, and promoting important […]
Note to Pati, 1969 Something of an aesthetic convergence between the diaristic autobiographies and quotidian images of Jonas Mekas (as illustrated in his Diaries, Notes and Sketches chronicles) and the hand crafted dissonance and material violence of Stan Brakhage, Note to Pati presents a seemingly typical winter scene – the day after a snow storm […]
On the surface, the stationary, extended long take of a desolate, tree-lined woods, the unhurried opening shot of Nanouk Leopold’s Wolfsbergen (channelling a sublimated naturalism that recalls Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice and Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light), seems disconnected from the film’s succeeding, fragmented images of the quotidian. In one episode, a middle-aged woman, Maria (Catherine […]
Something like a neutered cross between Dan Pita’s bituminous satire on dysfunctional leadership, Orienteering, and Nicolas Klotz’s exposition on corporate moral conscience (and amnesia) La Question humaine, Max Lemcke’s Casual Day is a serviceable, if slight and pedestrian take on the inherent fallacy of team building exercises that serve only to reinforce institutionalized power structures […]
During the Q&A for Strange Culture, filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson explained that the unorthodox, mixed format approach to the film evolved organically as a result of the Department of Justice’s ongoing prosecution of the film’s primary subject, SUNY Buffalo arts professor and experimental artist, Steve Kurtz, that continues to limit his ability to fully participate […]