Menu

Leslie Thornton

Novel City, 2008 / Horizontal Boundaries, 2008

December 30, 2017

Novel City, 2008 (Leslie Thornton) While Leslie Thornton’s 1983 film Adynata posed questions of exoticism and alterity in its cultural examination of China, Novel City represents a different, yet equally jarring notion of otherness – one borne of China’s rapid industrialization, economic transformation, and cultural amnesia at the turn of the century. Interweaving excerpts from… read more »

There Was an Unseen Cloud Moving, 1988

December 30, 2017

When avant-garde filmmaker Leslie Thornton created There Was an Unseen Cloud Moving, Islamic culture was not yet defined by antiseptic, then turbulent images of unresolved Gulf Wars (or conveniently stigmatized as the face of terrorism) but rather, by the evocation of alien landscapes, life-altering adventures, mysticism, isolative awakening, and passionate rendezvous of films such as… read more »

Adynata, 1983

December 30, 2017

Adynata is a figure of speech, a form of hyperbole that has been exaggerated to the point of impossibility. Similarly, Leslie Thornton’s seminal film, Adynata is also a densely assembled rhetoric: an exposition into the social representations of a perpetuated, exoticized otherness – an alien culture, an irretrievable past, an impenetrable psyche – a conjured… read more »

Sidebar