As we continue our exploration of the depths and widths of the subversive film canon we come to the beautiful unpolished gems of the third world that sparkle with revolutionary clarity in the midday sun of the world’s slums. In the early 1960s, Brazil would introduce its Cinema ... Read More »
In keeping with the spirit of this week’s Chiropteramania, I have paused my exploration of Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art in the hopes of joining in on all of this excitement. What better way than with the scientific explorations of Jean Painlevé and his uncanny ability t... Read More »
Roman Polanski’s Two Men and a Wardrobe witnesses the emergence of two young men from the depths of the sea, carrying with them a wardrobe that acts as an albatross of unspoken ideological dissonance from the status quo. The nature of their burden is of little consequence, as yo... Read More »
Age will always seek to suppress youth in varying degrees of severity because of a deep resentment over eroded ideals and waning passions that age and complacency have made the aged forget. The young still live under the (mostly) false assumption that they have the power to chan... Read More »
Politics are shaded by a collection of unrighteous rulebooks that we self-impose in the aim of fostering the prehistoric tribal instincts of the human animal. The rules lose their power when humanism is valued over nationalism because one objective path must be laid out for the ... Read More »
What exactly is cinema anyway? Some would (incorrectly) argue that it is a narrative captured on celluloid and re-projected for an audience, but there have been countless explorations in film that illustrate the ways in which narrative is merely one (optional) component in the d... Read More »
Language is one of those necessary evils that results from a need to communicate objectively in a world of strict rationalism. Its syntax and structure invade our thoughts and dreams and our inner stream of consciousness is often reduced to its clumsily confining borders. Some ... Read More »
Few avant garde filmmakers have deconstructed the possibilities of camera movement as succinctly as Michael Snow. The nearly imperceptible movement across the space of Wavelength (1967) illustrated the filmic compromises that are used to condense time and space to create a more ... Read More »
Western middle-class thinking is permeated with an arrogance and certainty of an objective linear truth. We want to reduce every decision in to something clearly defined with black and white implications as we carry out what we falsely believe to be a linear progression through ... Read More »
“It (film) is the only art form that allows for the domination of both time and space.” Jean Cocteau in Cocteau on the Film Read More »
This week we will be exploring the “Aesthetic Rebels and Rebellious Clowns” chapter of Film as a Subversive Art with Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. Vogel does not classify The Blood of a Poet as a surrealist work, but rather a conscious poetic deconstruction of time, space,... Read More »
