"Forough’s voice was the first disembodied female voice in an Iranian film. The opposite, of course, was common practice: women were bodies without voices. For Forough, however, the point wasn’t to just show bodies, not even to show just bodies, but to show bodies justly. "

I wrote about The House is Black and the moral vision with which Forough treats bodies, predicting the accomplishments of Pedro Costa in In Vanda’s Room decades later. You can read the full piece here:

On Bodies: The House Is Black and the Politics of Corporeal Representation(s)

"Tarr’s cinema at its best, as in his newly restored 1994 magnum opus, Sátántangó, transcends the notion of an observational cinema... Observation is the work of the scholar, the anthropologist, the scientist. Yet, watching a Tarr film isn’t an intellectual exercise, as much as it is a bodily exercise."

I wrote about cinephilia and the sensory/bodily pleasures of viewing Tarr’s Sátántangó for photogénie's dossier on long films, “The Eye of Time.” You can read my piece here:
Ways of Seeing: Sátántangó and Records of a Cinephilic Encounter

The compositions in this are Fassbinder levels of good

Emmanuelle Riva as a bisexual commie atheist and Blemondo as a sexy intellectual priest in a film by Jean-Pierre Melville?
OUI S’IL VOUS PLAÎT

After the film ended, before the Q&A started, I walked past Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe and Robert Eggers in the theater hallway leading to the exit, and had to pee so bad that I completely ignored them. In fact, I ignored them so hard that Dafoe said “I wanna know where that guy is going.”

Believe me, you don’t wanna know Will