Through stillness and simplicity it creates a sense of being in the room, of transporting you back in time. But in doing so, it also maintains the impassable boundary of time: it’s always a recreation, a re-enactment. The cadence of the voice over and the historical documents grant this an essay-like quality; an experimentation with re-enactment that made me think of NAT TURNER A TROUBLESOME PROPERTY. What remains of Bach is truly the music. The film anchors the transcendent beauty…
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Dune 2021
My third or fourth viewing and I’m still kind of surprised that I like this so much. I’m not a Villeneuve fan (I’m maybe even a hater), but my love of the source material compels me to find something here. As an adaptation I find it very clever in how it synthesizes many threads into its compositions and structure. In particular, I find its emphasis on scale and absence to be a fairly brilliant means to communicate the books’ ideas…
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HyperNormalisation 2016
Ultimately, Curtis’ argument is that the oversimplification of complex problems breeds oversimplified solutions, and when these overly simple solutions are implemented—often violently—they produce unintended consequences that further complicate the calculus. I would like to keep this front and center, because while Curtis has many aesthetic and methodological weaknesses, the framing of his thesis remains sound, even if he himself is not fully beholden to it. The case for complexity is a flexible position, one that does not divide political and…
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