"They may call it the 'Land of the Pure,' but Pakistan turns out to be anything but," says Fox News correspondent Kelli Morgan in her article on Pakistan, the "world's leader," she claims, "in online searches for pornographic material." Now, this idea is far from new: such discourse is but an accent to the common tale [...]

"Boredom of the ceremonial scenes depicted in historical paintings, and boredom in general. Boredom and museum. Boredom and battle scenes." — Proust The museum is the accumulation of ruins and culture, culture in ruins, which is to say in one word, history. There, ambiguity reigns: one is at a loss as to the whether all [...]

"If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing." — Michel Foucault, What Is an Author? "In our societies, characters dominate our perceptions. Our attention tends to be arrested [...]

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 [...]

"Bush speaks of 'war', but he is in fact incapable of identifying the enemy against whom he declares that he has declared war." — Jacques Derrida, September 2001 I. With the torturing of the terrorist, inducing confession works a double duty: on one hand, introducing terror to the terrorist serves as a subtle, unspoken confession [...]

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 [...]

“[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 [...]