Year 2017 in review
I’m not someone who likes lists, all sorts of The best films…, The worst films… etc I never saw a point of social media getting obsessed with someone’s subjective opinion, with someone they have never even met…
Books & Articles
Book review: Chantal Akerman, Passer la nuit – Corinne Rondeau (2017)
A small book at the bottom of a shelf that is overwhelmed with books on the big names of Hollywood; films, directors, actresses. There, somewhere in between those oversized books, I found the new book…
Nothing
Certainly, I could leave this blog post blank and let you do the thinking. This is what “nothing” is there for; it allows you to fill in the gaps that others have left, deliberately or…
Jean-Paul Curnier’s writings on the image
Something I genuinely love, now that I’m in France, is that I can walk into any book shop and I find amazing books that really get me. I open them, read the first page and…
Film Spectatorship
Something that has always fascinated me is film spectatorship in regards to Slow Cinema. While film spectatorship as a subject isn’t entirely absent from research, it is not as big a subject as it deserves….
Autoportrait en cinéaste / Ma mère rit (Chantal Akerman)
In the last fortnight or so, I have read two books by Chantal Akerman. One of them, Autoportrait en cinéaste, is, in fact, a sort of exhibition catalogue, published at the occasion of a retrospective dedicated…
Art and Therapy (Alain de Botton, John Armstrong, 2014)
Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong had been on my list from the moment I saw it online. With my research background – film and trauma, and the interest in how…
Book review: Contemporary art and time (2016)
Towards the end of my PhD research, I noticed that quite a few interesting works in my area have been published by Presses Universitaires de Rennes. In particular work that has come out of Université…
Wang Bing – A filmmaker in today’s China (2014)
I quite like how much material there is in France about Chinese director Wang Bing. I had always thought that he was as invisible academically as is Lav Diaz, but that isn’t the case at…
New books on Pedro Costa & Béla Tarr
The initial wave of I-want-to-be-the-first has subsided, and after quite a few not very good books on Slow Cinema or on slow-film directors, we’re slowly (of course, slowly) getting to a point where it is…