New book

There’s a new book coming out about the work of Michael Haneke.  Information is available here.

Society (spoilers)

This past week I watched Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989).  It was interesting on a couple of levels. On a personal level, I realized that apart from sci-fi and Woody Allen, I’ve pretty much skipped over the 1980s in terms of my film viewing.  Peter Greenaway was making films in the 1980s, but in so many [...]

Son of Man

‘Together we shall lead ourselves, whether it be to glory or destruction.’ – Jesus in Son of Man I’ve been meaning to start posting again, so when I saw that Catholic Anarchy had a post about the upcoming US release of Son of Man (directed by Mark Dornford-May), it seemed like a good opportunity to [...]

The Last Few Weeks

The last month or so has been a bit crazy so I haven’t been doing much writing.  During that time I did attend two conferences that I mentioned on this blog: ‘Christian Social Teaching and the Politics of Money’ at the University of Nottingham, and ‘Film-Philosophy’ at the University of Dundee. I don’t think it’s [...]

Review

Alex recently pointed out that Joseph Mai has reviewed Mullarkey’s book on film for the Notre Dame Philosophical Review.  The review, which you can read here, seems fairly solid.  I can’t speak to the nature of Mullarkey’s reading of Bergson, but the problem of relativism is one that I hope to address in my paper next month.  Anyway, [...]

Strike!

This morning I watched Eisenstein’s Strike!. I found some of the initial montage to be absolutely brilliant and I loved the shot of the factory in the puddle. Russian films from this era are great because you never have to guess who the evil capitalists are (though nothing quite tops the classic Soviet propaganda cartoons). [...]

Article in Film-Philosophy

Todd McGowan’s article in the latest issue of Film-Philosophy is quite good, though a classic example of what Baidou would call the didactic aesthetic.  Entitled, ‘Hegel and the Impossibility of the Future in Science Fiction Cinema,’ it is quite good though curiously doesn’t mention Althusser.  This might seem like a typical critique coming from someone [...]

Thinking Cinema with Greenaway, Resnais, and Godard (part 3)

In the previous posts I used Peter Greenaway’s four tyrannies to analyse two films that I think engage film as a medium.  At the beginning of this series, I posed a dilemma: if I am right and film’s goal should be to challenge its limits as a medium, what does this mean for regular movies? [...]

Thinking Cinema with Greenaway, Resnais, and Godard (part 2)

Godard’s Passion is another example of exploding cinema from within. Like Marienbad, the film doesn’t have a traditional plot. Loosely, the film centres on the efforts of enigmatic director, Michel, who is attempting to complete an increasingly expensive film. A secondary story is spliced into this one, featuring a young woman organising the workers of [...]

Thinking Cinema with Greenaway, Resnais, and Godard (part 1)

If this post had a subtitle, it might be ‘Travelling the thin line between brilliance and intellectual pretension.’  Picking up on my invocation of Peter Greenaway’s four tyrannies towards the end of my previous post, I want to examine two films that I watched this weekend, and suggest that they both represent refusals of these [...]