* Originally published at Cinética in April 2009. VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS | In the dark | In the opening shot of Moscow (Moscou, 2009), an actor wearing a t-shirt of the theater group Galpão holds a photograph of a park and tells the camera about the first time he spent his vacation in Moscow. His most […]
Cinema
The Limits of Control
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964) is known primarily for two structural elements: the relentlessness of Michel Legrand’s music score, which literally turns every single bit of a dialogue into song; and the striking use of color, which treats every surface on set as canvas to express […]
Displacing Identity II
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS In Claire’s Camera (2017), Hong Sang-soo’s talent for creating small moments of beauty and sustaining a productive friction between what’s in front of the camera and the off-screen space creates a manifold experience that is frequently pushing the spectator out of the film in order to bring them back in with a […]
Displacing Identity I
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS The crossroad between the cinema and the gallery space is one of complementarity and dissent. At the same time that moving image works made for the museum are in many ways a refusal of cinema – sometimes, a refusal of the very apparatus: the dark room, the hidden projector, the rows of […]
“The Given Word” at NYU
The Fourth Wall film club is screening Anselmo Duarte’s The Given Word (O Pagador de Promessas, 1962) on 16mm tonight, and they have invited me to do a brief introduction. The film was based on a play by Dias Gomes and won the Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. The screening is […]
Goodbye to Language (Adieu au Langage, 2014), Jean-Luc Godard
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Article originally published in Eugênio Puppo & Mateus Araújo (ed.) Godard Inteiro ou o Mundo em Pedaços (São Paulo: Heco Produções, 2015), 280. Translation from Portuguese by Fábio Andrade. One of the few artistic strategies that have survived the many distinct phases of Jean Luc-Godard’s work is the pun. Often associated with comedy, for Godard the […]
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Chantal Akerman
* Originally published at Cinética, December 14th, 2017. VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS Everything happens The book by the Brazilian researcher and scholar Ivone Margulies on the work of Chantal Akerman holds in its title a synthesis of what’s required of the spectator by a film such as Jeanne Dielman: nothing happens. The title is a witty […]
Western (2017), Valeska Grisebach
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS The conquest of the West If seen as a piece of drama, Western, by Valeska Grisebach, either offers too many entry points or not enough. There’s the beauty of the landscape, the muted naturalism of the non-professional actors, the precision of the cinematography, the allusion to geopolitical conflicts, and even a hint […]
The Process of Truth
* Originally published at Cinética in August 2011, and first translated into English in March 2013. VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS In What is the Contemporary?, Giorgio Agamben points out the discrepancy to one’s historical moment as an essential feature of the truly contemporary person. “But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are […]
What Now?
On February 23 and 24, NYU will be hosting its annual Cinema Studies Student Conference. As part of the first year PhD cohort, I’ve had the pleasure of helping put this together, alongside fellow first-year students in the PhD, MIAP, MA, and undergraduate programs at the department. The theme of the conference this year is […]