Letterboxd — Your life in film

“The fear wouldn’t go away. And she began to feel that these thoughts would die before her. Die trying to be heard. She didn’t understand them, but she feared the savage state of death more than ignorance. So she opened the doors, and slowly the words came alive and began to speak to her, saying: These are for those to whom history has not been friendly, for those who have known the cruelties of political becoming, those who demand in…

Together with Wall Engravings and Repeated Absences, Le clair de terre forms a triumvirate of cinema as memory that is as fragmented as the photographs in the films. Photographs that serve as points of thematic departure and return: as memorabilia that motivates the protagonists' (in)actions to reach for a past and as narrative nodes of involuntary memory. In all three films, Guy Gilles’ editing is representative of the gaps of cinema which are the gaps of time. And like our…

The poverty of a film's production.

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A film is like a battleground. But not exactly in the manner of Samuel Fuller’s romantic aphorism in Pierrot Le Fou. Film history is in reality the history of film distribution, just like the modern history of war is the history of its distribution and economics. A camera and the film industry, a rifle and the munitions industry, are analogous in that order. The abundance of munitions and the lack of it; the…

"Gentlemen, we'll do better next time."

According to Bazin, Louis XIV was content to survive in his portrait by Le Brun. The same portrait that hangs in the background as he dies in this allegory.

Comparisons with Rossellini's The Taking of Power by Louis XIV are inevitable. That film ended with Louis uttering the words that neither the sun nor death can be gazed upon fixedly. Louis became the sun. But in Ecclesiastes it is written, "I have seen something…