red, red
the pitiless sun, and yet—
the autumn breeze
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Ukraine-Poland: The Border of Solidarity 2022
Quite shockingly bold for its willingness to discuss the problematic history of Polish-Ukrainian relations at a time when they have never been so brittle. This latest work from Kowalski is as much a study of the area’s legacy of inter-ethnic violence (and the director’s personal relationship to it) as it is a documentation of the war effort and Poland’s immense support for their embattled neighbours. Drawing the majority of its power from the Poles’ attempts to reconcile their desire to…
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Words of Mercury 2011
What I love most about haiku is that very powerful sense of being in and a part of the world the best of them evoke. Reading Bashō or Issa you’ll be hit by their remarkable sensitivity to the spaces around them. And they need to be sensitive if they’re to create lucid and truly expressive snapshots of moments in time, which is what the haiku traditionally functions as. This is why the greatest haiku possess a clearly defined ‘situatedness’; indeed,…
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Can't Get You Out of My Head 2021
As with any project approximating this kind of approach to a politico-historical theme, there is a selection of material here that necessarily chooses certain things while leaving other things out. Obviously, there is thus a danger of misrepresentation in how this theme—only ever something partial—is represented as relating to the social totality. This series discusses the failures of revolutionary movements and the destruction of gains made by the labour movements in the West which led to the extension of the…
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Wife of a Spy 2020
"He's a businessman, not an enemy."
Like all of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's best films, the transformations that this narrative undergoes operate as if the central character's perceptions of the conflicts around them have been extended into the form of the film itself. What struck me most immediately about this work was its interest in the conflict between cosmopolitan business interests—always seeking to supersede state boundaries and borders—and the interests of the nation-state, tied inextricably to a sense of irrationalism, which are…
