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La Madre 2012
In Histoire(s), Godard wonders, through Borges: “If a man passed through paradise in his dreams and received a flower as proof of passage, and on waking found this flower in his hands... what is there to say?"
The memory is enough. Cinema, the memory factory.
Seeing La madre at the recent MoMA retrospective was one of the most romantic experiences I've had in a film theater. Seeing it again at home is like remembering the face of someone who was…
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Où en êtes-vous, Jean-Marie Straub? 2016
Straub takes part in the cat videos simulacra. Maybe we are like Ancient Egyptians after all and now it is easier to embalm our cats.
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The Glass Shield 1994
Michael Boyce Gillespie thinks this is a bad film and I agree with him. That courtroom scene has more cuts than a Fast and The Furious car chase. Worst Burnett film I have seen.
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Hasta la victoria siempre 1967
Came to say
Let’s all pray
Hooray, HoorayOh Che
He's wearing a red star
Smoking his cigar
And when he died
The whole world lied
They said he was a saint
But I know that he ain’tOh Che
Oh Che
Oh Che
Oh Che
Oh Che
Oh Che
Oh Che
Oh CheHe just wanted to make the world a better place for you and me to live
Oh Che
Oh Che
Oh CheOh Lord, you gotta help me now to find my way
Oh Che- Suicide & Spacemen 3
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Deep Cover 1992
"The jungle creed says that the strongest feed on any prey it can. I was branded beast at every feast before I ever became a man."
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The Janitor 1974
In pace with the vanguard with We Can't Go Home Again (1973), The Janitor is Nicholas Ray's metaphorical and bitter self representation in short film form. The figureheads of Cahiers and worshipers of the cult of the artist are the ones going down on Ray in the short. Ray, the marginalized filmmaker of the 70s and deposed figure of the classic period. Ray, the janitor.
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Chameleon Street 1989
So it turns out that mumblecore is reactionary cinema. Alex Ross Perry in particular ought to be paying royalties and damages to Wendell B. Harris Jr.
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The Spook Who Sat by the Door 1973
Sold to United Artists as "the usual" blaxploitation fare. Pulled from theaters by the FBI because of radical politics.
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Horse Money 2014
To begin with the documentary and to give it the truth of fiction. Pedro Costa's greatest film because he has fully embraced this.
A film with no distinctive chronotope; in it space and time are muddled in order to resemble a cinematic dream (or nightmare) where Ventura, the main character and a victim of Portuguese colonization, relives the Carnation Revolution and his colonial wound through genealogy, trauma, and memory - from a time before his birth represented by photographs and…
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Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song 1971
An explosion.
As avant-garde as a Shūji Terayama film and militant like Santiago Alvarez's reels, and all done with some of the finest dissolves to be seen in the cinema. Sweet Sweetback is a destruction of Classical Hollywood's image of the black male and a denunciation of police brutality that is as relevant today. It's all enough to make one think that the Blaxploitation genre it helped spark was a Hollywood corruption of the collectivist spirit of the film (see…
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Tabu 2012
A doomed love story told in flashback and whose chronotope is a Portuguese colony and the tensions of the era that would ultimately lead to the revolution of 1974. But these are merely backdrops for a higher concern: that romanticizing neo-colonialism is all right if you are doing one for the altar of b&w expressionism.
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D'Annunzio's Cave 2005
Spectral dissonance.
"In technological modernity, we can track an ongoing sense of being haunted—by language, images, commodities, bodies. And yet it’s increasingly easy to feel, especially if one has a seat at the table, untroubled, fleshed, streamlined—all crispness, fluency, and versatility. However, it’s also very easy to feel—this especially if one does not have a seat at the table—like a zombie or an animal (I would say “ghost” but ghosts sometimes speak)." - Robert Fernandez