Lost soul in a (post-)postmodern world. Lofty idealist. Lover of beauty. Poet in the simulacrum.
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
The Night of Counting the Years 1969
The looming questions of elitist Anglocentric cultural legitimacy, of intercultural conflict, of the sanctity either granted or denied to art as public monument, and of the highly political act of selective preservation (which is to say...all acts of both foreign and domestic preservation at the very end of the day—what we both collectively as a race and as outsiders don’t “save” says as much as about us what we do “save” from certain annihilation) raised by this film are perennial…
-
The Hart of London 1970
This film...is a universe...unto itself... If I make but one film or novel or epic poem that approaches anything resembling its meandering magnitude, its cross-borne thoughts, its tonal totality, my life will not have been spent in vain.
In its mining of a scintillating filmic vein not altogether dissimilar to Stan Brakhage’s DOG STAR MAN, I have found the impossible depths of Jack Chambers’ THE HART OF LONDON to be inexhaustible and oh so inexorable in their terrifyingly elemental precision.…
Popular reviews
More-
The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes 1972
[Brakhage film viewing 2/2 for the new year]
I can say without an ounce of hyperbole that my first (and possibly only) viewing experience of this film was the longest 32 minutes of my life.
This existential horror movie takes the naked facts of the material reality of human existence, the inescapable finality of death, and the eventual "way of all flesh" and lays them completely bare to the audience to such a degree as to shock all but the…
-
Blood of the Beasts 1949
In Georges Franju’s The Blood of the Beasts, the looming threat of violence never feels far beyond the reach of the largely immaterial limits of the screen. For someone known for far more unapologetically surreal ventures, Franju displays a remarkable restraint here I appreciate all the more as someone for whom his Eyes Without a Face did shockingly little for. I don’t know if it’s the literally more grounded subject matter here or what (this technically being a documentary and…
