The Enigma of Russian Dada
If art is about the fostering and maintenance of traditions, then the Russians were proposing a kind of anti-art. An exploration of the exhibition catalog, Russian Dada 1914-1924.
17 Jan 2019
If art is about the fostering and maintenance of traditions, then the Russians were proposing a kind of anti-art. An exploration of the exhibition catalog, Russian Dada 1914-1924.
Kierkegaard's existential rumination on our impossible relation to an incommensurable and unknowable God informs much of Bergman's work, and most certainly Scenes from a Marriage.
The soul projects meaning onto a world that resists it. This is the plight of existence for Poe.
One way to understand the form of Walther Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, is to see it as producing states of flow that reinforce a flat ontology among humans, animals, machines, buildings, bodies of water, etc.
Where, in A Woman without Love is the imagination, wit, and brilliance one expects of Buñuel?
Chekhov is engaging with an underlying, rumbling, non-event that pervades life and yet is nearly always blithely ignored. His stories move us in their ability to excavate this subterranean, haunting static that informs all experience.
The inability to communicate truthfully and accurately runs like a red thread through the course of Robert M. Young's western, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.
There's a rotten core at the center of Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait. No matter how engaging I find Haskell and Sariss's enchantment with the film, I cannot accede to their critical adulation of it and of Henry.
Lino Brocka's Manila in the Claws of Light seethes with rage against colonial oppression without ever becoming overt agitprop.
In John Waters' work, poor taste is a manner of refinement that attains a strange air of considered sophistication and knowing advertency.
In Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's film the protagonist is an inhabitant too estranged from his country to belong, a tourist too familiar with his environment to experience the passing joy of surprise.
The experiences you have in NYC are not the best experiences to be had, the sex you have is not the best sex, the friends you make are not the best of all possible friends—but they ought to be.
Resnais's approach to direction is similar to Montaigne's approach to the essay: sticking to concrete fact and recognizable example, the viewer/reader is transported with unexpected celerity to the far reaches of abstraction.
From Bowling for Columbine to the recent Fahrenheit 11/9, one wonders, what is being validated in Michael Moore films?
The Father is the wielder of profuse potency but it can only be maintained through distance and the renunciation of understanding, the willingness to embrace the mystery without examining it. But, necessarily, the child must penetrate that veil.
Bill Malone presents insights into the musical acts that gave rise to and perpetuated the country music tradition in all of its internal contradictions, negotiations, and accommodations.
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