Popular reviews

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  Review by Z. W. Lewis ★★★½ 1

  I interviewed Michael Robinson for The Brooklyn Rail here.

  From the intro:

  Michael Robinson’s newest video work, Onward Lossless Follows (2017), takes a trip over desert landscapes to the great digital future unknown. Along the way, stock videos show women celebrating in front of their laptops, horses fly, and an unsettling meet-up burgeons into a relationship full of love and loss. It’s par for the course for Robinson’s remixing of footage that’s plenty “off” all on its own, but, under Robinson’s control, points to just how weird our collective culture can be. His Light Is Waiting (2007) damned Full House through a kaleidoscopic Tartarus, and his These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (2010) took Michael Jackson to heaven (or somewhere nicer)…

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  Review by Michael Sicinski ★★★½

  [7]

  From my TIFF Wavelengths coverage for MUBI:

  Throughout much of his work, Michael Robinson has explored the emotional sweep of popular song, something that touches us all even though it is dismissed by some as representing bad taste or, even worse, the tug of nostalgia. His films have given the lie to such simple formulations, making plain the degree to which complex affective states can be distilled into a single pop culture artifact.

  But this is only one aspect of Robinson’s work. He has consistently taken these known elements from our collective dreams and wedded them to the mysterious or the inexplicable, as though some key phrase or image were offering insight to the workings of the unconscious. Alas,…

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  Review by Darren Hughes ★★★★

  From my 2017 Wavelengths report for Senses of Cinema:

  Onward Lossless Follows is the latest in a series of films by Michael Robinson that meld his on-going preoccupations with kitsch and pop culture ephemera with what we, during my long-ago Southern Baptist days, called “givin’ testimony." Line Describing Your Mom (2011), Mad Ladders (2015) and the new film are each narrated by found audio recordings of visionaries—a dreamer, a prophet, and a preacher, respectively—whose slow drawls share a cadence and an unshakable conviction.

  In Onward Lossless Follows, Robinson pieces together footage he’d collected over the past decade, some of it found (stock images of women cheering in front of laptops, a “stranger danger” video, black and white science education films),…

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  Review by Alex Engquist ★★★½

  Eerie, desolate, and sad. Avant-garde doesn't need a narrative but I appreciate how Michael Robinson suggests the shape of one using disparate formal elements. Here the center of that narrative - a story of abduction that becomes one of lovers escaping together - is rendered via an onscreen text conversation reappropriating and building upon footage from a stranger-danger PSA. This feels like a desperate reach for the transcendence Robinson found in earlier works, like These Hammers Don't Hurt Us, which euphorically reunited Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson from beyond death, across space and time. Here the sinister implication of the material clashes so violently with the meaning Robinson ascribes to it that escape becomes impossible, as if doomed to fail.…

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  Review by Aaron Hendrix ★★★½ 1

  Somehow, the suggestion of the contours of a narrative only serve to enhance the communication of the emotions at the center of this film. So often narrative does the exact opposite. It's a narrow tightrope to walk, but this film does it beautifully.

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  Review by calamityhey ★★★½

  I was having a real Michael Robinson bday this year.

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  Review by James Hansen ★★★★½ 1

  Watched today on a larger cinema-worthy screen. Gobsmacked. MR's best since Light Is Waiting. A major work that clarifies some of his recent videos and continues to push appropriation forward in unexpected ways. MR is gradually restructuring the collective cosmos. Celebrate with trepidation.

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  Review by Madeleine Jane ★★

  I think I spend too much time watching collage/found footage films thinking about the labour of the source material. Anyways, questions of deferred joy - the pessimism of the voice over pastor about there being no water on Mars with the stilted joy of the stock photo woman and their computers, the predatory interactions of the woman and the young girl transferring into the text conversations of hidden love (I'm becoming obsessed with the gap between image and sound but I think that's because I'm currently working as a closed-captioner). How can we talk about drought and fear when we have this text of love, over images of plants intertwining? What will win out in the end? I had more to say but forget to keep notes.
  Also, I guess if you only use a fragment of a Lana Del Rey song you don't have to pay for copyright.