Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Martin Dornis & Micha Böhme Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Martin Dornis & Micha Böhme

Tradition In Sour Times

The musicians’ interpretation of the song seems to combine tradition and modernity, with the brass band itself representing tradition and the adapted song representing the modern, contemporary. However, the brass orchestras appear oddly out of time, unintentionally comical. They seem to be enacting the funeral of what they represent—the postal service as a state enterprise, tradition, and society before globalization. Yet, for centuries, the postal service symbolized progress, innovation, and renewal.

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Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Steffen Andrae Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Steffen Andrae

Making Mute Relations Speak

If the forced collision of dramatic characters and public situations is understood as a metaphor for art, then according to Mailand / Innenhof, art’s role seems to be that of a troublemaker. However, the “theoretical and practical creation of situations,” which echoes a situationist self-understanding, doesn’t only target scientific or political events. It also aims at the so-called cultural sector, and thus at itself.

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Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Patrick Zapien Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Patrick Zapien

Terre Verte

…what goes beyond the performance as surplus action becomes the real content of the film, its driving purpose. The actors don’t only play a version of themselves in Olho da Rua, they act at their acting as well and in such a way that the indications of confidence or doubt that flash across their features are never so clear. Is the feeling theirs or another’s? Is it real or feigned for the camera? Do they themselves know?

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Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Allison Hewitt Ward Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Allison Hewitt Ward

On 80064

I do not like 80064. I do not like watching it over and over again for the purpose of this essay. It’s pornographic raw tape of the unmediated real deal. Bullying an old man is a lazy stand-in for the work of art. It would be better to live in in a world in which this video does not exist. But it does.

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Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Tobias Ertl Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Tobias Ertl

The Poetics of Disassembly

In Chu’s film, the dismantling becomes a metaphorical operation: it signifies a disassembly of reality into elements—akin to the montage character of film itself. But does this reveal the true reality of social labor? Hardly, because labor resists representation, both in its social function—as a source of surplus value—and in its everyday individual experience.

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Criticism, Reviews, Film Ethan Linehan Criticism, Reviews, Film Ethan Linehan

Review of Chevalier

I penned the bulk of this review on the back of conversations with friends when we watched the film after it came to Hulu in the summer of 2023. But I sat on it, convinced that no one in the broader public had seen Chevalier — or ever would.

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Reflections, Essays Fred Camper Reflections, Essays Fred Camper

Political, or Not

Cinema remains the least understood of major arts. So often film commentaries discuss mostly, or only, the plot. But to begin to understand any film, one must examine it as cinema, shot by shot, edit by edit, in terms of composition, lighting, movement, editing rhythms and juxtapositions, and more, because the way the viewer sees its depictions affects how one feels and thinks about what is shown

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Reflections, Essays Fred Camper Reflections, Essays Fred Camper

The End of Avant-Garde Film

The view of art underlying the essay, and the type of film that remains my principal, though not only, model for greatness in cinema, have themselves been bypassed by much that has happened since, in particular the emphasis on the politics of an artwork, and on various aspects of the artist's identity rather than complexity of internal form.

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