Lingering shots embrace the unassuming beauty of desert landscapes as we hear about the dreams of Iraqi children from Goptapa, a Kurdish village that has seen its share of trouble as it was gassed in the 80s. Those old enough to remember will be forever afflicted by the social in... Read More »
A few decades before the opulent debonair comedies that would make him an undeniable master of cinema, a young Ernst Lubitsch was tinkering with the limits of cinema's potential as a tool for social commentary with his unassuming silent comedies that played with complex thematic ... Read More »
William Klein lived through the oppressive tumult of the 1960s and though the world seemed to be crumbling around him into a final war between squares and the fatally groovy he was able to find the sublime humor of the situation and create social satire that is absurd but frighte... Read More »
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a rare mix of documentary and narrative elements that attempts to reconstruct the events surrounding the purge of communism from Indonesia in the mid 1960s by allowing the perpetrators of the transgressions against humanity to tell their... Read More »
Emperor Tomato Ketchup is a revolutionary experimental film from Japanese filmmaker Shuji Terayama that juxtaposes nudity and political radicalism as logical bedfellows and uses the misplaced priorities of mainstream thought as weapons against society, condemning it for fearing i... Read More »
The legend of the inception of Chelsea Girls is that Andy Warhol drew a single line down the center of a napkin, writing black on one side and white on the other. In this deviously simple act, Warhol was actually conceiving what would be the next logical format for his photograp... Read More »
A mysterious stranger is washed upon the shores of a strange land, presumably freed of the sinister driving forces and sins of an old life that is never clearly articulated, leaving the viewer to wonder what evils have driven this man to seek redemption and invent himself anew. ... Read More »
In an unlikely combination of one of America cinema’s most influential filmmaker’s and one of the fathers of avant-garde films, Elia Kazan and Ralph Steiner combine forces to create a wonderfully subversive short titled Pie in the Sky (1936), where there might not be enough pie f... Read More »
In a bold move taken from the cues of Vienna Actionism and grim concepts only teased in the films of Gaspar Noe and Lars von Trier, Adam Rehmeir creates a film that incites the viewer’s sensibilities and makes them confront the universal darkness that lives within us all as we ar... Read More »
Amos Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art is a book that initially inspired the title of this column and after his passing I devoted my series to the content and spirit of his preeminent book and its diverse chapters that captured different movements throughout film history. Each ar... Read More »
“The subversive artist performs as a social being. For if it is true that developments in philosophy, politics, physics, and cosmology have affected the evolution of modern art, and if the subversion of the contemporary filmmaker is thus fed by art itself, it is also directly re... Read More »
