An early episode in Esther reveals the deliberately atemporal tone of the film’s rote depiction of the titular character from the Old Testament as officers dispatched by King Ahasverus (Zare Vartinyan) on a mission to find the fairest maidens in the kingdom (among whom, one will replace the disfavored Queen Vashti) traverse an ancient hillside […]
Redshift, 2001 Named after an astrophysics light measurement in order to indirectly calculate the distance between objects (and consequently determine its age), Emily Richardson’s Redshift presents a vast, desolate nighttime landscape in which motion is realized through movements of light through empty spaces (achieved through fixed camera time-lapse photography) that is set to ambient white […]
At first glance, Christophe Girardet and Matthius Müller’s terse and ingeniously conceived Hide unfolds with the tactile eroticism and wry humor of Peter Kubelka’s irreverent life cycle meditation on “transcendence through product consumption” in Truth and Poetry. Composed of densely atmospheric and highly stylized recycled commercial footage of young, picture perfect models pleasurably applying personal […]
After having missed the first hour of The Best of Youth when it screened at the 2003 New York Film Festival, I had constructed a mental scenario of what happened in that first hour that would have reconciled the way the film eventually unfolded. I had thought that Giorgia, the institutionalized young woman, was Nicola […]
Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite (Immagini disturbate da un intenso parassita), 1970 Paolo Gioli’s frenetic, delirious, and curiously transfixing magnum opus Images Disturbed by an Intense Parasite is an invigorating, confounding, and ultimately mind-blowing visual study in redefining the bounds of human cognitive saturation – a complex, multilayered juxtaposition of bifurcating and intersecting aural […]
Each day, a divorced, middle-aged dance hall chanteur, Alain Moreau (in an elegant performance by Gérard Depardieu), attired in his white satin suit and sporting a provincial, stylishly overgrown haircut with a touch of highlights, sings from his stout repertoire of familiar – yet not too iconic – love songs before an appreciative audience in […]