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The Zone of Interest 2023
A failure—and how could it not be?
The history of cinema is a history of failures. Many, certainly, but two were on my mind while watching Zone of Interest.
The first is the failure of form, or, to quote Godard:
The history of the cinema and the history of its errors are one: the error of trying to paint ideas better than music, to illustrate actions better than the novel, to describe feelings better than painting.
And the second: the…
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Blonde 2022
Wringing pathos from artifice.
Blonde is a strange, messy film, occasionally incredibly stupid, as often transcendent. More nightmare than biopic with a sensational score from Cave and wild formal experimentation in look and feel.
Interpreted through a framework of psychological realism, it’s an embarrassment. But what if, instead, the film is confessing the impossibility of psychological insight in a biopic? This is what the stunning formal experimentation suggests to me. It embraces artifice, myth and iconography, and complex networks of…
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Pola X 1999
A generation for whom love is either incestuous or without a face finds a sense of purpose in confronting historical trauma—they feel something for the first time as they recognize their own complicated complicity in the subjugation of the outcast. Turning inward to interrogate this complicity, they tear down the cement wall in search of the smoking gun, but behind the wall there is nothing, an empty room and a brief reflection.
All my life I’ve waited for something that…