* Eric McDowell *
In fact it makes more sense I think to speak of P.T. Anderson’s worlds, in the plural—a variety not only of specific places and times but also of narrative, formal, and stylistic choices and strategies.
First Films: P.T. Anderson’s “Hard Eight” Read More »
To commemorate the 71st anniversary of the Jewish Ghetto Uprising on April 19th, the daffodil was invoked to transform the yellow badge Jews were required to wear during the Nazi occupation into a symbol to “ express your respect and memory of the heroes from the Warsaw Ghetto.”
Warsaw Dispatch: On Daffodils Read More »
* Kaveh Bassiri *
“The most disgusting film I ever made.”
Rainer Werner Fassbinder on Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?
When I was an undergrad at Santa Clara University, I took buses to San Francisco to see foreign movies. I remember rushing into a double-bill of Rainer Werner Fassbinder films. During the first movie, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970), I had to go to bathroom. I thought nothing important is going to happen, so I went.
When the Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary Read More »
* Mary Camille Beckman *
Before Dora García’s Instant Narrative was installed there, the apse of the local university art museum was the kind of space I’d cut through on my way somewhere else. The bathroom, the contemporary galleries upstairs, the auditorium in the basement. Nineteenth century American landscape paintings line the walls, visible between marble columns. The mood: quiet, cold. The mood: formal, save the rumpled students slouching through on their way, like me, elsewhere. Before Instant Narrative, I moved through the apse largely unnoticed and unnoticing.
Dora García’s Instant Narrative Read More »
* Claire Skinner *
If you’re a poet (or anyone with a sensitive personality prone to changeable moods), Spring can pose some emotional challenges. It can be grating–cruel, even–when the beauty of the outside world (daffodils! baby robins! teens in love!) seems at odds with whatever’s going on in the hidden cupboards of the self.
* Kevin Haworth *
The core problem with Muppets Most Wanted is that it contains no grief. In the new movie, the Muppets are back, with the world no longer needing to mourn their absence. Miss Piggy, too, has returned, filling that pork-shaped hole in Kermit’s chest. Yes, things are happening—shows are being staged and crimes are being solved—but it all just feels like objects in motion staying in motion. Kermit gets shipped off to a gulag, but, notably, he doesn’t seem all that sad about it.
Toward a Muppet Theory of Literature Read More »
Leslie Jamison answers Antoni’s implied imperative: use yourself, your emotions and your responses, as an analytical and critical tool. Antoni’s ideas illuminate Jamison’s primary techniques—Antoni and Jamison, perhaps, share a working definition of empathy: empathy as an effort of imagination, effort of intellect; empathy as a door through which to enter art, for reader, viewer, and maker; empathy as inquiry; empathy as the site of analysis; empathy as resistance to tradition or traditional tropes; empathy as choice.
Query and Response: “The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison Read More »
* Eric McDowell *
In that same spirit, I would like to put The Grand Budapest Hotel aside and travel back to 1996, the year of Anderson’s feature film debut, Bottle Rocket.
First Films: Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket” Read More »
And so it arrives. The moment when the long-haul traveler realizes that she could be from the place she currently lives.
Warsaw Dispatch: Where Are You From? Read More »
