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 […]
Rewatching Eduardo Coutinho
Rewatching the films of Eduardo Coutinho, like I did yesterday thanks to Flaherty NYC, is very emotionally demanding. Being in the theater, seeing him and listening to him once more brings back his presence as absence: for Brazilian cinephiles, seeing a new Coutinho film was a ritual one could count on, but no longer can. Today, […]
Creepy (Kurîpî: Itsuwari no rinjin), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Japan, 2016)
And this blog awakes from a long, restless sleep to find out Kiyoshi Kurosawa had a new film playing at the New York Asian Film Festival – a film whose existence I was completely unaware of, despite Kurosawa being one of my very favorite filmmakers and that the movie had premiered not too long ago […]
Gabriel Mascaro: Ebbs and Flows
I still haven’t gotten around to writing about Neon Bull for Cinética, but I didn’t want to overlook the beginning of Gabriel Mascaro’s first US retrospective, starting today at Lincoln Center. I’ve been writing about Mascaro’s work since 2009, when High Rise (Um Lugar ao Sol – literal translation: a place in the sun) premiered […]
Housemaids (Doméstica), by Gabriel Mascaro (Brazil, 2012)
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published in Portuguese at Cinética in May 2013 and in English in February 2014, later republished in revised form in Victor Guimarães (ed.), Housemaids (Recife: Desvia, 2014) 22-27. Imponderable dramaturgy When I wrote about Gabriel Mascaro’s 2010 short The Adventures of Paulo Bruscky, one of the notes left out of the final […]