Category: American cinema
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David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” as the Painting of A Lost Mind
The camera is focused on a highway, its yellow stripes are passing by rapidly, and Bowie’s song I’m Deranged is playing; a highly suggestive introduction into the film. In the opening shot, we see a man smoking a cigarette, by carefully following the narrative throughout the film, we can recollect that he is in death…
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Silence (Martin Scorsese, 2016) “The Dark Night of the Soul”
Earlier this year, I wrote an article about this very film, “Last Breaths of Christendom in the Land of the Rising Son”, emphasizing the role of the Japanese state (Tokugawa Shogunate) and the Hobbesian reading which implies that the state proscribes the teachings and religions practiced by the populace; in this case the state religion…
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Freedom or Security? – MCU’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”
Chris Evans, the actor who impersonated Captain America, said the following words regarding his character’s transition from the WWII era to the modern day: “It’s not so much about his shock with [technology]… It’s more about the societal differences. He’s gone from the ’40s to today; he comes from a world where people were a…
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The Advent of “Joker” – A Pathological Struggle for Recognition
Editor’s Note: Since the film is in the cinemas at the moment while I am writing this article, I will not reveal any details about the film’s plot, and I will certainly not write a value judgment of the film. Whether the film is enjoyable or not in the final verdict is a matter of…
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Dionysiac Union with Art in Aronofsky’s “Black Swan”
Aronofsky’s Black Swan follows the ballet dancer Nina, who gets a part in the production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. She is fragile, innocent, fearful and pure, but lacks the feel for playing the Black Swan, while she is a perfect cast for the White Swan. In the performances of Tchaikovsky’s ballet, the same ballerina sometimes…
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Confessions of Britain’s Most Violent Criminal – Refn’s “Bronson”
In the final lines of the chapter “The spectacle of the scaffold”, in his book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes about a great shift in the portrayal of criminals in fiction, which took place in the 19th century: “We are far removed indeed from those accounts of the life and misdeeds of the criminal…
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Journey into the Unconscious: Alex Garland’s “Annihilation”
For me, [Annihilation] was a film about the nature of self-destruction… it was about an observation I made, which is that everybody appears to be self-destructive. Some people are very obviously self-destructive because they’re addicted to heroin or alcohol… Other people are very comfortable in their own skin, and they’ve got a fantastic job and…
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Silence (Martin Scorsese, 2016) “Last Breaths of Christendom In the Land of the Rising Son”
The first European Christian missionaries landing in Japan… found their hosts totally unprepared for the message of salvation they brought. Not indifferent however. On the contrary, their preaching… though it was radically at odds with native beliefs, it was warmly received… Baptismal waters flowed. Japan might have gone Christian. But it was not to be.…
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A Veiled Body: The Divided Self in Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence”
We question a country’s self-mythology. Perfect town and perfect family are – like Westerners – part of America’s mythology, involving notions of past innocence and naïveté. But is it possible for innocence to exist while something heinous transpires elsewhere? David Cronenberg In David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence something heinous transpires underneath the presentation of…
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Sins of the Father in the Melancholic Triumph “Manchester by the Sea”
A cynic would say that a razor blade should distributed alongside the DVD version of Manchester By The Sea, just like one music critic suggested regarding Leonard Cohen’s album Songs of Love and Hate. In that kind of reasoning there is a misunderstanding of the power of the melancholic experience when it is shown in…
Vigour of Film Lines 