Cinema can have love and often at first sight. But justice is something cinema cannot frame. It is always outside the frame. Cinema is inept also in that it cannot keep up with the devaluation of time and the shrinking of space. The very industrial revolution that gave rise to cinema is destroying both. The [...]

The spectacles of shame in Ki-Yong Park's Camel(s) (2002) and Satyajit Ray's Charulata (1964) are majestically constructed, animated by an aesthetic quality of restraint that deploys as its artistic technology negative space—that is, the interval between, or what the Japanese call ma (間) and Eastern philosophy understands more broadly as śūnyatā. On this basis, shame [...]

Neither Youssef Chahine nor Hind Rostom are the stars of Youssef Chahine's Cairo Station (باب الحديد ,1958); — the city of Cairo is. In the film, the beautiful and the ugly for which cities like Cairo are praised and lamented, are unclothed, rendered naked to reveal something fearfully honest in its deceit, like a man's nonchalant peak [...]

In what is perhaps the most famous scene of Buñuel's Viridiana (1961), Handel's Messiah gives rhythm to a bestial orgy: a burglary turned bourgeois banquet held by a motley group of beggars. Though the village paupers broke in and commandeered the estate of their benefactor ex-novitiate Viridiana with the intention of just "looking around," what [...]

I. The scenes are of healthy, sun-kissed bodies copulating with vermin. The simplicity of the arrangements, their undeniable nonchalantness, succeed in disconcerting the spectator, drowning him in ambiguity: is man preying on beast? or is beast preying on man? what of certain sexual roles: giver and receiver, dominant and dominated? But then once the spectator [...]

I. In cinema, a precise memory of the Nazi lingers on;—or, as it should be said, a precise memory of a memory of the Nazi lingers on. It is of a sly and evil militant steeped in a peculiar sadism and misplaced eroticism. Well cut, too ordered to be mad (or perhaps madly in order), and [...]

Though Koyaanisqatsi has an overtly prophetic air—several apocryphal Hopi prophecies are chanted to Phillip Glass' infamous score—the film's value or novelty does not lie in its eschatology or its "life is out of balance" thesis. Rather, like its contemporary Akira, Koyaanisqatsi's novelty lies in its capturing of a freakishly balanced mechanized life—an artificial life symbiotically tied to a disciplinary order that [...]

snap-shot, n. 1. a. Hunting. A quick or hurried shot taken without dilerate aim, esp. one at rising bird or quickly moving animal. - Oxford English Dictionary The camera is a weapon like any other: "ready, set, fire," as the film DDR/DDR formulated, is not unlike "lights, camera, action." In both cases the scene is [...]

Connaissez-vous quelque chose de plus outrageusement fécal que l'histoire de dieu et de son être: Satan [...]? Do you know anything more insultingly fecal than the history of god and of his being: Satan? - Antonin Artaud, Théâtre de la cruauté Whether he is ha-Sataan (הַשָׂטָן) the accuser, or el-Shaytan (الشيطان) the adversary, Satan is [...]

“[The Heterotopia of Compensation’s] role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled…I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner.”- Michel Foucault, Des Espace Autres (1967), Heterotopias. David Lean’s mise en scène of [...]