* 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 […]
Moonlight (2016), Barry Jenkins; The Human Surge (El Auge del Humano, 2016), Eduardo Williams
* Originally published in April 2017 at Cinética. VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS The specific is dead; long live the specific 1. Moonlight is a tripartite story about the life of Chiron, a boy growing up to be a man in a tough neighborhood in sunny Miami. The film is based on an unproduced play beautifully titled […]
Mix #03
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 – […]
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 […]
Jealousy (La Jalousie, 2013), Philippe Garrel
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published in October 2014, at Cinética. The ruin of what was not met by Fábio Andrade Jealousy opens with a shot that is as synthetic as it is grabbing. Of being grabbed: Clothilde (Rebecca Convenant) with her teary eyes focused somewhere beyond the camera, and with a trembling, terribly trembling mouth, […]
In the Shadow of Women (L’ombre des Femmes, 2015), Philippe Garrel
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published in October 2015, at Cinética. Shadowplay One characteristic that has remained remarkably constant in Philippe Garrel’s work is his predilection for setting his films in a gap, an interval between two people’s very distinct experiences of the same relationship. In movies as different as The Birth of Love (1993), […]
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 […]
A Tale of Love (1995), Trinh T. Minh-ha & Jean-Paul Bourdier
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published in Portuguese in Carla Maia and Luís Felipe Flores (ed.) O Cinema de Trinh T. Minh-ha (2015) Rio de Janeiro: Caixa Cultural. 87-91. A room of one’s own A Tale of Love begins with a wide shot of a mountain under blue sky, covered by dry weed that sways in the […]