Seducing the Future

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Reactionary Wokeness

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Incoherent Cinema

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Trumpian Images

“Baby, there’s no storm outside.” —from Take Shelter In his now classic book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Siegfried Kracauer looked for cinematic hints, clues and warnings about the rise of Naziism and Hitler in pre-War Germany. Published by Princeton University Press in 1947 — just two years after the end of the war — his book was among the first to interrogate the deep architecture of film as a psychological state, one that does not directly mirror but rather reflects in a distorted way the “secret history” of mass psychology that, in his…  Read more

Against the Reality Industrial Complex

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Into the Cut: Is Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups the Perfect Movie for our Instagram Era?

We are approaching the 50th anniversary of the publication of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage (was it a printing error, or a pun?), the book that put the phrase on the map, and whose ideas McLuhan had first advanced in his 1964 book Understanding Media. There he argued that “the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” And, later: “Nobody is interested in TV until there are TV…  Read more

Underground Desires

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Blood, Simple

Creative freedom can be a real motherfucker. As anyone who has tried to make something — a story, a poem, a painting, a movie — can attest, the mantra “go ahead, make whatever you want” can lead to paralysis when it comes to actually creating something of distinction. Having unlimited creative options is like having none. There’s a long and rich history in cinema of self-conscious efforts to impose strictures on the filmmaking process, whether it be the Dogme 95 movement, the single-take technique (Victoria, directed by Sebastian Schipper, is a recent example), or the structural limitations imposed by the…  Read more

Creeping Time

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The Need for Speed

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