a shameful waste of madhouse time

lanotte_062220070442.jpg (JPEG Image, 550×365 pixels) via kwout

Antonioni films are always difficult for me. They are in their wayso eravishing and yet there is something maddeningly obscure about them. The dialogue is not something that you can understand if you are expecting stuff that echoes regular speech. If you watch the European auteurs of that era [...]

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Les Amants (The Lovers) is another of the Louis Malle CC films I’ve picked up before the DVD shop got harmonized for the Olympics. They say this is the film that made Jeanne Moreau into a star. She had already been famous before this (1958), most notably as the youngest woman to ever become a [...]

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I think it was a happy coincidence that I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked and Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) in succession, on the same day. Both are character-driven movies about men who, on the surface, appear to live in the same world as us. Sure, they’re troubled—but only temporarily so.
Of course, [...]

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It’s amazing the kind of stiuff that you find at your local DVD shops in Shanghai especially if that shop.,
like the one that I go to, is run by a guy that is into art films and therefore stocks his fair share of
Criterion Collections. I’d watched Cleo from 5 to 7 before, and I thought [...]

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This French website of ideas and culture has, thankfully, an English section* and in it an essay enttiled “Democratic Universalism as a Historical Problem”. In that I
found the following passage:
Hamilton thus spoke of the �vices of democracy� and criticized its propensity towards excess. The terms �deathly illness,� �confusion,� and �license� were regularly associated with �democracy.� [...]

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Ever since stumbling across his grave at the Montparnasse cemetery, I have been not quite obsessed � persistently inquisitive � about the life and times of the Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dadaist movement. I was just looking over his single entry in Wikipedia, and found this quote plastered on [...]

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