As the ever-brilliant Mike Thorn and Neil Bahadur have already extensively gone over (elsewhere than the links as well) the context of film history and technology Star Wars undertakes, hopefully I can add something more relevant to my own focus: its metaformal modality and those accompanying contemporaneous politics.

If I can hope to first briefly distill here the most relevant points made by Mike, Neil, and my other VA comrades, formally, the prequels' digital innovation is both a conduit of…

Fascinating in its singular (or singled out) repugnance, Cashback would be very easy to throw in the trash. Those who feel art is for use in exhibiting proper social values to the unwashed masses are the most wont to shun such films as this: those which exhibit and do not interrogate political immoralities such as, in this case, sexism. Odd, as Cashback should be an instance where the usefulness of honestly bigoted art is made clear.

A single perspective piece…

This really says a lot about our society.

The idea of even beautified ethnography in the cinema is quaint in a post-YouTube information age. There are literal prisoner dance routines at one point. Thus this film, high on its pure early beauty, and thus itself, ends up with profundity inside the pretentious. Sure everyone knows the basic idea of this, but the occasional human detail and the cinematic perspective (often literal, helicopter shots reframing familiar terrain to the point of…

This is from an assignment from my Art Philosophy class, hence why I mostly talk about the opening shot. I got an A.

I often argue for the importance of context in art, and this is one of the ultimate uses of it in film. The opening shot of Michael Haneke’s brilliant film Caché is at first mundane, then terrifying as it recurs throughout the film. It didn’t need to be artfully framed to serve its purpose perfectly and at…