Tag
Film
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The Shape of Ménage à Trois to Come
“However much desire there is for the threesome to maintain its stability, the cultural force of homogenous marriage is strong.”
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Caught in the Game
The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh devotes just over a minute of his documentary, The Missing Picture (released in the US in March), to the work of Ang Saroeung, a Khmer Rouge cameraman who filmed the fields of Democratic Kampuchea as they were—barren—and the glorious “new people” of the nation as they were—starving and devastated. When…
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Lars von Trier’s Nymph()maniac
In the New Republic, Eric Sasson centers his review of Lars von Trier’s Nymph()maniac on the belief that “[o]ne can’t make a movie about nymphomania and not have it be about female sexuality.” While this more or less may be true, it is no less true that a movie entitled Nymph()maniac need not be concerned (primarily)…
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Humans and Other Animals
Toward the end of Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana (2013), an elderly mother and her daughter enjoy fast-melting ice cream bars while returning from their pilgrimage to a hilltop temple in rural Nepal. “We’re like children still learning how to eat,” the younger woman comments, as much to her mother as to the camera.…
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Rotten Love
In the mid-1940s Fritz Lang made two films in quick succession, both starring the same trio of actors: Edward G. Robinson, Dan Duryea, and Joan Bennett. The first of these works has the more notable pedigree; The Woman in the Window (1944) was among the crop of Hollywood exports to France that would, along with…
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Changing Landscapes
The Museum of Modern Art recently completed its 13th annual Documentary Fortnight, a two-week festival of international nonfiction film. In a city flush with film screenings, the Fortnight is notable for its wide-ranging social interests as well as its commitment to the limits of documentary form. “So much that defines documentary today is about the…
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Her Own Audience
Gloria, the heroine of this film, has no fear of the grande geste. If her date’s ex-wife won’t stop calling him, Gloria will drop his cellphone in his soup. If, before making love, she must remove the abdominal binder that gathers in her boyfriend’s excess flesh (a consequence of his gastric-bypass surgery) she will do…
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Alexis Rockman: Drawings from Life of Pi; with A Letter to the Artist
Public Books is pleased to present our first collaboration with the Lyon-based cultural institute Villa Gillet in connection with their fall Walls and Bridges festival in New York City. From October 9 to 20 the festival will celebrate critical inquiry and performance by French and American thinkers and artists from across the humanities, social sciences, and arts. Public Books is…
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Class Diaries: Reflections on Michael Apted’s Up Series
The British documentary film Seven Up!, broadcast for the first time in 1964, was originally intended to be a single, stand-alone program. Made by Granada Television for the current affairs program World in Action, it focused on 14 seven-year-old children from a variety of backgrounds across England. According to Paul Almond, the director of the…
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Errol Morris, Forensic Epistemologist
Earlier this year I was contacted by the editors at Zum, a new Brazilian photography quarterly, who explained how they’d lately taken …
