In Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity, author Philip Mosley makes a salient and illuminating re-evaluation of a bifurcated Belgian cinema, not only through the reality of a federal state characterized by a decentralized government and regional autonomy, but also irreparably marked by occupation and war, and divided by a cultural heterogeneity that has […]
In Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, Ivone Margulies provides a comprehensive examination of the minimalist visual imagery, deliberate pacing, and recurrent themes of disconnection, wanderlust, isolation, and longing that define Akerman’s intensely personal cinema. Citing Akerman’s penchant for filming the rhythm of everyday life, and her de-emphasis of unique and significant events, Margulies proposes […]
In the film’s droll, double entendred opening sequence, a breathless woman, Catherine (Aurore Clément), speaks off camera in dulcet, anxious tone as she provides a series of guiding, seemingly appetent directions against the image of a grand piano craned precariously overhead, culminating with a stray tear that falls from her cheek at the point of […]
A young man stranded in a Mexican border town recounts the vivid and tragic story of his older brother who crossed the border with a group of illegal immigrants into the U.S. only to wander for days in the disorienting wilderness – each night piling together for warmth and protection, and each morning, fewer and […]
An outwardly fragile and introspective man named Simon (Stanislas Merhar) stands in a darkened room poring over an audioless film footage of a group of holiday revelers at a seaside resort in Normandy. Repeatedly cueing the film to the excerpt of a beautiful young woman, Ariane (Sylvie Testud) and a friend, Andrée (Olivia Bonamy) overlooking […]
The opening image of D’Est is of an unhurried, stationary shot of a green hazed, obscured highway at twilight, as the intermittent hum and audibly shifting Doppler frequency of a distant, revving engine from an occasional traversing vehicle – some errantly never materializing on screen – provide the sole, false anticipation of a visual break […]