Mix #03 – Puzzled by the Sound from Another Day Abstract: The space between earth and air. Beats and rests, dots and bars. Numbing repetition and dizzying variation. The Ramones and Steve Reich. The crystal palace and the cave. Sand and cement. 01 – Do Make Say Think – Bound and Boundless 02 – Clima – […]
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Araby (Arábia, 2017), Affonso Uchôa & João Dumans
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS For the sake of the song The title of Araby (Arábia) – an enigmatic choice for a film set in Minas Gerais, Brazil – appears twice during its 96 minutes. The first time is as a conventional title card, except that it is introduced over 20 minutes into the film, separated from […]
News from Home
. The winners of the 8th Cinema Tropical awards will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image this coming weekend, February 2-4. I was part of the fiction film jury last year and, if the criteria haven’t changed, the awards are for Latin American films with a festival premiere between May 2016 and April […]
Lover for a Day (L’Amant d’un Jour, 2017), Philippe Garrel
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Sacrificial love An older man meets a young woman in what looks like a public building. They smile at each other and walk together towards a door: “Professors’ Restroom”. He has the key. The two have sex in the bathroom – an action we see mostly through the expression on her face […]
Measuring Change (2016), James Benning
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Landscape Of all the signs of generosity present in James Benning’s landscape-based work (and one could easily argue that even Twenty Cigarettes and Readers are landscape films), there is one that seems especially counterintuitive: they are films that can fit neatly into brief descriptions. Descriptions are both essential and contentious in the […]
Mix #02
New mix on Mixcloud. Here’s the tracklist: 01. Brian Eno – Fickle Sun (III) I’m Set Free 02. Here We Go Magic – Collector 03. Grizzly Bear – Mourning Sound 04. Arto Lindsay – Each to Each 05. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Love’s Refrain 06. Solange – Cranes in the Sky 07. Dirty Projectors – Up […]
The erotic humor of Sergei Eisenstein
Alexander Gray Associates has a show on called Sergei Eisenstein drawings 1931-1948 (closes February 11). The objective title conceals a revelation: the collection of drawings – many of them, in America for the first time – consists almost entirely of humoristic sketches of (literally) graphic sexual nature. The downplaying of this sensational fait divers masks […]
Song 23: 23rd Psalm Branch (1968), Stan Brakhage
As artists, critics and curators struggle to find the best vantage point in a context of global sociopolitical regression, the Anthology Film Archives presented the series Inauguration of the Displeasure Dome: Coping with the Election, with the intent to “remind us that the struggle to maintain a humanist, progressive society is a perpetual one, that […]
Hold Up and the politics of the graceful Leviathan
Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016) – both the record and the extended video – is a new version of what, by now, has made her a household name that transcends pop stardom: appropriating and repurposing icons and ideas from other artists and art forms from all walks of life, to quite literally turn them into gold. From the fan-captured […]
Mix #01
Starting the year with serious plans to keep the blog more active and sealing the promise with a treat: a mix of songs I’ve been listening to the past couple months. I used to make these every month at my former blog, and while I won’t promise the same regularity this time around, every now […]