personal viewing diary
no ratings, just my thoughts & notes
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
Chigh 1996
[DCP]. From my understanding, this was Aslani’s return to filmmaking more than a decade since his previous film Child and Imperialism (1982) due to the political climate and the suppression/banning of his work. It’s less expository than the directly-stated history lessons in some of his earlier documentaries and instead propels itself through the central juxtaposition between gradually revealing the steps in a tradition of carpet-making out of chigh, a texture of woven materials, and the voice-over readings of Hadj Nemat’s…
-
Vampires 1998
Nothing to say on this viewing so I'll just post this great review by Hélène Frappat, translated via google with the original French text included below it.
JOHN CARPENTER'S NEW LEXICON
About Vampires by John Carpenter
by Hélène Frappat
“Some of my best friends are ghosts…”
Dana Andrews in The Curse of the Demon by Jacques Tourneur
Western
With Vampires, John Carpenter organizes the irrefutable encounter between the fantasy thriller and the western, between Tourneur and Hawks or Walsh. In…
Popular reviews
More-
Remains to Be Seen 1989
In an interview with David Grillo, Solomon describes the difference between his and Brakhage’s films by noting that, “there’s no sense for me of a body actually behind the camera as oppose to lets say Brakhage, where you almost always feel the human physicality behind the camera in his photographed work.” This distinction seems clear in how both filmmakers approach illustrating life, aging, and death - Brakhage overwhelms the senses while Solomon focuses them and whereas Brakhage’s films are always…
-
La région centrale 1971
In some respects, Snow is positing an antithesis to Brakhage’s filmmaking, at least as far as Brakhage’s expressionism (the camera as representative of Brakhage’s eye) is at the opposite side of the spectrum from Snow’s impressionistic vision. From my own personal experience, La région centrale has informed my awareness of the distinction between what the filmmaker sees, what the camera captures, and what the audience perceives in the frame.
If one supposes that part of our attraction to cinema, as…
