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
Chadwick Jenkins
Chadwick lives in New York City and teaches Music History and Theory at The City College of New York. He earned his doctorate in Musicology at Columbia University. He has given papers on topics ranging from 12th Century lament to Duke Ellington and early radio to the use of Wagner's music in Bugs Bunny cartoons. He has published in scholarly journals on the music of John Cage, Richard Strauss, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He has taught courses on music history, the history of rock, and the history of jazz at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Columbia University.
Recent
The Unhappiest Two: The Impossible Demand in Ingmar Bergman's 'Scenes from a Marriage'
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.
10 Dec 2018
Mangled Body and Depraved Soul: On the Corporeal and the Spiritual in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe
The soul projects meaning onto a world that resists it. This is the plight of existence for Poe.
05 Dec 2018
Engaging Flow: On Ruttmann's 'Berlin, Symphony of a Great City'
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.
30 Nov 2018
Beneath Buñuel: On 'A Woman without Love'
Where, in A Woman without Love is the imagination, wit, and brilliance one expects of Buñuel?
27 Nov 2018
Chronicling the Non-Event: Anton Chekhov and the Short Story
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.
26 Nov 2018
The Improbability of Communication in 'The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez'
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.
21 Nov 2018
Slouching Toward Redemption: Ernst Lubitsch's 'Heaven Can Wait'
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.
19 Nov 2018
At the Crossroads of Pity and Revolt: Intensity and Time in Lino Brocka's 'Manila in the Claws of Light'
Lino Brocka's Manila in the Claws of Light seethes with rage against colonial oppression without ever becoming overt agitprop.
16 Nov 2018
The Dialectic of the Freak: On John Waters' 'Female Trouble'
In John Waters' work, poor taste is a manner of refinement that attains a strange air of considered sophistication and knowing advertency.
07 Nov 2018
The Fog of the Interstitial: Existential Disaffection in Alea's 'Memories of Underdevelopment'
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.
16 Oct 2018
On Susan Seidelman's Film of Aimless Desire, 'Smithereens'
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.
11 Oct 2018
Illusion Is Power: The Indiscernible Nature of Influence in 'Stavisky...'
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.
02 Oct 2018
Why Does Anyone Turn to a Michael Moore Film?
From Bowling for Columbine to the recent Fahrenheit 11/9, one wonders, what is being validated in Michael Moore films?
27 Sep 2018
Action at a Distance: The Father in VÃktor Erice's El Sur
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.
25 Sep 2018
Seeking Authenticity: Bill Malone's 'Country Music USA' at 50
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.
10 Aug 2018
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