Choosing Experience in Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Taste of Cherry’
Critic Roger Ebert was frustrated with Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry because the film subverts our desire to understand another -- the very core of cinema's intent.
philosophy
The Erotic Disruption of the Self in Paul Schrader’s ‘The Comfort of Strangers’
Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers presents the discomfiting encounter with another —someone like you—and yet entirely unlike you, mysterious to you, unknown and unknowable.
Breaching Closure in Pasolini’s ‘Teorema’
Pier Paolo Pasolini's classic drama, Teorema, grapples with the parable -- the manner of knowing that which always remains just beyond our grasp.
What Does Water See? On Fighting as Perception in Bruce Lee’s Kung Fu Films
Bruce Lee's fight scenes evoke Gestalt theory: actual perception is a response to a provocation. Consider this philosophy while watching the films in Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits and you too can become the water.
On Infinity in Miranda July’s ‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’
In a strange kind of way, Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know is about two competing notions of "forever" in relation to love.
First Tragedy, Then Farce, Then What?
Riffing off Marx's riff on Hegel on history, art historian and critic Hal Foster contemplates political culture and cultural politics in the age of Donald Trump in What Comes After Farce?
We Must Not Mean What We Say: On Godard’s ‘Le Petit Soldat’
While philosopher Stanley Cavell endeavors to show that we must mean what we say, Godard’s Bruno Forestier of Le Petit Soldat suggests that we simply cannot and must not mean what we say.
Stepping into the Phantasmagoric Otherwise with Karel Zeman
While all films project a world that might be, certain films and certain filmmakers, like Karel Zeman, come closer than others in bringing to the surface the underlying phantasmagoric essence of cinema.
Shahidha Bari’s ‘Dressed’ Is a Well-packed Suitcase
Reading Dressed is rather like the experience of wandering through a department store or a friend's well-curated closet.
Parasites: Montesquieu on the End of Civic Virtue in a Republic
Bong Joon-ho's scathing Parasite reflects Montesquieu's critique that the decline of civic virtue causes great social inequality, which then incurs greed, envy, and violence.
Defragmenting Bodies: Yoko Ono’s ‘Fly’ at 50
In her 1970 avant-garde short Fly, Yoko Ono works within the same parameters as directors like Alfred Hitchcock or Takashi Miike. Yet, she posits the intermixture of her celluloid images as reconstructive effort, not a destructive one.