Tag: cinephile
Ways of Watching: Taming the World Through Cinema
Watching films is about more than pleasure. It can be educational and thought provoking, but it also scratches a more primeval itch, one born from our desire to make a safe, controlled space to live in. Cinema helps us to own and to tame our world. Ownership through oils In his book and television series…
Paul Morrissey: Flesh, Trash, Heat and the Undead
“Don’t say “Warhol films” when you talk about my films! Are you so stupid, you talk to people like that? I have to live through this for fifty years. Everything I did, it’s Warhol this, or he did them with me. Forget it. He was incompetent, anorexic, illiterate, autistic, Asperger’s — he never did a thing in…
Jim Jarmusch: Only Indie Left Alive
Early on in Jim Jarmusch’s first feature film, Permanent Vacation (1980), its vagabond hero Allie reads aloud a passage from Les Chants de Maldoror, and quickly announces he is bored by the meandering surrealistic narrative. Toward the end of Jarmusch’s eleventh and latest feature, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), vampire hero Adam watches a talented…
Knowing Where to Start: On the Necessity of Lists and the Canon
I’m sitting on the couch of my share house flicking through the cable TCM guide and hitting record on the films of interest. Woman of the Year (1942) with Katherine Hepburn? Record. An Affair to Remember (1957) with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr? Record. To Have and Have Not (1944) with Bogart and Bacall? Record.…
Poetry In Motion (Pictures): 19 Films that Feature Poetry
There’s a very easy way for screenwriters to make characters seem smart, and that’s to have them quote some verse, usually by a heavyweight poet (Shakespeare, Milton, Yeats or Eliot). Sometimes it’s just a way for the screenwriters to wear their educations on their sleeves. Splendor in the Grass (1961) Splendor in the Grass,…