Illuminations #21

Vendredi soir - Claire Denis, 2002, 35mm

Illuminations #20

For Zoohky - Isiah Medina, 2013, digital video

Realism(s) #38

New Orleans - Lee Friedlander, 1969

History Lesson(s) #25

Museum Hours - Jem Cohen, 2012, HD video & Super 16mm

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I asked why he always used the term 'late capitalism,' and how people knew it was so late, and if it wasn't perhaps more troublesome if what existed now was early. He knew a lot more than me, but he didn't seem to have an answer for that...

At sea #13

Prayer ceremony for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami - Arun Sankar K., 2013, for AP

Realism(s) #37, or: on déplace le problème

Les salauds - Claire Denis, 2013, HD video

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I think I focus on fathers. To be a father, like Marco is a father. And what happens when this kind of thing occurs between a daughter and a father. Because the daughter is not completely a victim of her father, she is accepting it too. In a way—maybe I'm about to be completely crazy—when I was the age of a daughter I thought if I had a bad experience with sex, even though the man was brutal or ignorant or whatever, I always took it for granted that this was my problem. That this was the problem of women, to keep it for ourselves. On déplace le problème. [We shift the blame.] I remember when I was very young and coming home and thinking: "Well, this is my problem. There is nowhere I can go and complain." There's not a guiltiness of being a woman, but women deal with their bodies in a very complex way, a total way, a global way. Not like men. Men, they have a hard-on or not. The feeling of a woman is so much more complex, because she can pretend, she can fake, she can also be terrified and hate and not show it. I think to be a woman is a complete sexual experience in a way. And this makes everything more complex.

--Claire Denis, interviewed by Kiva Reardon in cléo 1.3.

History Lesson(s) #24

Vers Madrid (The Burning Bright!) - Sylvain George, 2012-13, digital video

Traveling Light #2

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For the next month, Gina Telaroli's great Traveling Light (2011) is streaming at Lumière and freely available to download in HD. I wrote a short text about related sounds (see also: the post below) to accompany this release, one of many fragments of prose, images and video also compiled here. Alongside watching the film itself, I strongly recommend reading Gina's 'precarious preamble', which addresses issues of craft, labour, class and gender with an openness and honesty that often seems to be absent in reflections on contemporary filmmaking. Traveling Light will also be playing at Anthology Film Archives in New York (before the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon) alongside a short programme of train movies – a good excuse, if needed, to revisit 4'8 1/2" from afar.