Ausma – Laila Pakalnina (2015)
How does one handle a film, which so strikingly resembles human memory, in particular traumatic memory? The Baltic states have had a tumultuous history, most of which isn’t known in the world, let alone in…
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Your Face – Tsai Ming-liang (2018)
When have you last looked at someone? I mean, really looked at someone, took your time to study every detail. I remember this marvellous shot in Silence in Dreamland by Tito Molina in which one…
Heimat is a space in time – Thomas Heise (2019)
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to write something that would do justice to Thomas Heise’s Heimat is a space in time (2019). It speaks to me in so many ways, on so many…
Season of the Devil – Lav Diaz (2018)
Those of you who have been with me for a couple of years already know that I have been a huge Lav Diaz fan. Melancholia, my first film by Diaz, thoroughly impressed me and when…
Afternoon – Tsai Ming-liang (2016)
Does this conversation have to be so miserable? Tsai Ming-liang asks. His two-hour long conversation with his fetish actor Lee Kang-sheng, Afternoon, will perhaps remain one of the least known of the director’s works. First…
Time in Japanese art and society
Those of you who have been with me for a while will remember that I used to be very keen on establishing a link between traditional Chinese painting and Slow Cinema. Of course, this approach…
Memory of Time – HeeWon Lee (Rennes, 2019)
It is possibly the first time that I’m writing about a specific video installation here on this blog. I have read quite a bit during my PhD research in order to understand the uses of…
Chantal Akerman – Afterlives (Marion Schmid, Emma Wilson, 2019)
Afterlives. The title of the new English-language book on Akerman’s work, edited by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson, is poignant, painful even, but perhaps the most fitting for this very collection. It’s been almost four…
Escaping time
I didn’t expect my thinking about the possibility of escaping time. It’s one of those age-old science-fiction dreams that people have. Time travel is perhaps the most imagined, the most commonly imagined form of escaping…
Walden – Daniel Zimmermann (2018)
Not so long ago, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. Published in the middle of the 19th century, it is now something of an iconic book about nature, about the woods, about the…