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Four Paragraphs on Jean Vigo
À propos de Nice, one starts with photographic landscape, the omniscient view from above of people, places, and palms, the bird’s-eye view of a port city, divided by the gray ocean on one side and by...
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The 20 Best Films of 2011 (Part One)
2011 was a fertile year for festival films, especially for well-established and world-renowned auteurs, a few of whom happened to produce some of their most vital work. Some interesting parallels...
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The 20 Best Films of 2011 (Part Two)
Here now are Hydra Magazine’s top ten films of 2011: 10. The Tree of Life — dir. Terrence Malick (USA) Despite my reservations about the film’s overly ambitious (and, consequently, hugely flawed)...
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On the Erotics of Evil
Cradled in evil, that Thrice-Great Magician, The Devil, rocks our souls, that can’t resist; And the rich metal of our own volition Is vaporised by that sage alchemist. Charles Baudelaire — Les...
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Imagining America’s End: A Tale of Two Cities
“I think that redemption, or enlightenment, or some sort of truth is found very close to destruction,” said director Benh Zeitlin in a recent interview in The Atlantic, referring to his wildly popular...
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A Pentagram for Conjuring Hollis Frampton
Portrait of the artist as a young man Author’s Note: the following paragraphs are excerpted from a longer work on the cinema of Hollis Frampton. The remaining two sides of the pentagram have been...
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Trauma, Love, and Time Travel
I’m drawn to the American actor and action hero Bruce Willis. But I’m drawn more precisely to Bruce Willis drawn into himself, in that fantastical simulacrum known, conventionally, as film. I’m...
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“Owners of their Faces”: Faciality and The Master
In “Year Zero: Faciality” (A Thousand Plateaus [1980]), Deleuze/Guattari assert that “since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise that a very special...
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The Twelve Best Films of 2012
The pop cultural eschatologies generated by the (decidedly westernized) myth of a 2012 termination date revealed more of a desire for wide-scale destruction than an actual fear of it. Apocalypse, we...
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Sensorial Cinema: Grandrieux’s “Un lac”
The first thing we see is not a thing, a subject, but an action, a process. Movement, blur, breathing, violent strokes. A young man strikes vigorously, repeatedly, savagely, at a tree with the blur of...
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