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“It gets absorbed.”
“It finds a role in the body.”
Lines spoken by a pivotal character late in Gyorgy Pálfi’s Taxidermia, they could mean anything. A commentary on pre- and post-Soviet Hungarian individual and cultural identity or which filmic genres are stirred into this surreal mix.

Francis Bacon not so much with a brush but with scalpel strokes lay back the skin of a dark existence. Gauguin sought, found and painted his garden of Eden. Basquiat, careerist that he was, perhaps didn’t completely translate but at least jotted down semaphore signals from the streets. In films trying [...]

In 2005 Werner Herzog made Grizzly Man about Timothy Treadwell, a man who lived among Alaskan grizzly bears and was ultimately killed by one. The kindest thing to say about Treadwell was that he was a lost soul who’d finally found his calling, but in the film he came across as needy and delusional, not [...]

Lemon Tree (Etz Limon) is about a Palestinian widow whose property has hundreds of lemon trees, planted by her father and thriving for over 50 years. The Israeli Prime Minister and his wife move in to the house adjacent her property. Their Secret Service deem the lemon trees a threat to their security, and order [...]

Beeping consoles. Whirring Fans. The sounds of malfunctioning, T.V. shopping-network-bought products. These are just a few of the things that come into mind when I hear the name Jacques Tati. Play Time (1973), while already having its place in the Criterion library, is now released unto us via the Blu-Ray disc format, and for [...]

Other Voices, Other Rooms: Acoustic Design in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965)
As the title sequence of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion suggests, with its violation of the human eye in closeup by thin striations of text, the film we are about to watch is one concerned with altered perceptions. Like the infamous razoring scene from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist [...]

Nominally billed as a murder mystery, director Jean-Luc Godard’s lost 1966 comic book film has as much to do with film noir as hamburger does with a doorknob. This slight and charming cinematic episode, which due to financial reasons has rarely ever been seen in the forty years since its original release, is notable for [...]