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If Andrei Rublev is an epic biography and The Mirror is a personal memoir, both of which celebrate the individual subject in the throes of history, then Stalker is Tarkovsky going back to what is most fundamental - objective metaphysics. More specifically, Stalker is about how metaphysical ideals interact with desire. These ideals are transcendental excesses that call or beckon us, they fill us with the highest emotions such as hope and anxiety, while we ponder over ways to navigate around those unexpected setbacks thrown upon us. We struggle and doubt their supposed "absence" (here we see how Tarkovsky's Christian tendencies are best exemplified in Stalker). What if it's all for nothing? What if the goal itself is unobtainable or even a necessary illusion? What comes after the goal is reached, is there no striving any further in life? Are we afraid of directly confronting it because it will reveal all the repressed thoughts inside us all along? Society is afraid to confront such questions. By definition they point to a reality radically antithetical to the ordinary functioning of utilitarian pragmatism, hence it constructs walls to keep the posing of such questions away from us. Tarkovsky reminds us - the zone cannot be delineated, contained, repressed by political forces.

It becomes apparent that the metaphysical ideals alluded to can only have as much reality as the desires that will them into existence. The nature of desire is that it operates outside of concrete rational knowledge. The zone of desire exists, but its existence is inferred by the indirect effects that it has outside the zone. Desire isn't simply a deferment of pleasure nor a lack that sustains the individual. Desire operates underneath knowledge. Individuals cannot directly confront desire but only approach centripetally by circling around it (sometimes in retrograde motion), as we observe in the film. Do we actually know what we have not yet desired, and do we desire what we do not yet know? The answers Tarkovsky would've likely given are NO to the former and YES to the latter.

To illustrate with the competing choices of eating meat vs being a vegan. Knowledge is incompatible with desire. Desire is unconscious, knowledge is the justification for the selection of one choice over another. But this selection is temporary and can easily fluctuate depending on factors beyond one's control. So both desires (to eat meat and to abstain from eating meat) are always already in conflict, but one can only know which one has "won" when sufficient motivating circumstances forces one to prevail and enter conscious choice. Yet, Nietzsche would say its all spontaneous and random - there is no soul or free will that selects one over the other, at this or that moment. Tarkovsky is saying, we do not know what we have yet to desire, and we desire what we do not yet know. The plurality of desires within each one of us (Nietzsche isn't simply valorizing a singular subjectivity but a multiplicity of split/fractured subjects) exceed that of conscious rational knowledge.

Amongst Hong Sang-soo's entire body of work, this film is perhaps the most tightly rigorous in explicating the recurrent themes of difference that unfolds with repetition, and repetition that subsumes difference. Hong would often employ parallelism in narration and structure across his entire oeuvre - with neither "perspective" or "part" claiming more truth/reality than the other. Both are simultaneously true at once, and the concept of right and wrong becomes a normative claim that later on gets retrospectively attached onto each state of affairs based solely on the consequence, the endpoint or (intended) goal of the character and/or viewer. Hong's films are adequately subtle to indicate that any consequence of our actions/behavior cannot be reduced to the sequence of preceding events. In either case the future is uncertain and remains open to changes, albeit one may be construed as more desirable than the other hence the assigned normative claim of right and wrong, relative to each other. The cinema of Hong is all about parallelism, difference, and repetition. It is not a cinema of determinism, causation or even ethics. It is a cinema of chance, randomness and indeterminism.

The fatal error is in reading Hong's films as a didactic treatise into human behavior or how one ought to behave. It's neither about the honesty of spontaneity nor the importance of miniscule changes in one's actions having a butterfly effect on outcomes. Imperceptible changes in behavior result in drastic changes in outcome, whilst dramatic changes in behavior result in barely perceptible, or inconsequential, changes in outcome. The fact is that neither are predictable, as one could only judge an action after the consequence has elapsed, and therefore cannot be used as a template for future course-of-action. An additional layer to the complexity of our social interactions is the effect of the environment (milieu) on our psyche and thus our actions. This is very much beyond the limits of our control, but always already present and motivating the way we behave. The glare of the sun in the first chance encounter forces our protagonist to adopt a more awkward posture, whilst in another world the warmth of the sun results in a more comfortable posture with his surroundings. We only notice such details when the scene is repeated, not before but after - difference can only be understood through repetition.

Perhaps we can take it a step further and view the oppressive mood reflected in the mis-en-scene of the first half vis-a-vis the light-hearted mood in the second as a subjective reevaluation of what has already happened. I'm inclined to believe, given how both are laid out and labelled accordingly (Right Then, Wrong Now / Right Now, Wrong Then), that we are viewing the whole picture as some sort of "spot the difference" exercise, just as other Hong's films presented in objective matter-of-fact fashion. One may certainly interpret the second sequence as wish fulfilment but that is entirely up to the viewer rather than the filmmaker. Time and again, the brilliance of Hong's films is in the fact that they RESIST prioritizing one point of view over another. As a result, not only are we exposed to the plurality of perspectives but more importantly also that of hidden discoveries and unactualized potentialities found during each moment. A different camera angle/lay-out of surroundings/way of speech and its tone and inflection would reveal/obscure certain features which our minds may choose to focus or even over-index on as possible explanations for any difference in outcome.

This is why I made the claim that Hong's trademark parallel narrative structure is so refreshing and unique in cinema. His films enumerate multiple worlds that hang together; sequences and events which are all real simultaneously but which converge through the act of observation and analysis. These can be understood not as multiple trajectories indicating possibilities (what *could have* happened) branching off from a single actual world, but moreso as parallel worlds with no causal efficacy between them. Make no mistake - Hong is not a fatalist but a tragic romantic. In his obsession to track and arrest difference through the act of repetition (both performatively and conceptually) something totally new always emerges with every scene he repeats, and in every film he directs. With this philosophy in mind, the parallel universes that Hong creates and reflects upon endlessly are what elevates the POSSIBLE to the POTENTIAL.

Caught in an endless stream of life without beginning nor end, where transcendence and immanence (up/down), arrival and departure from one phase/journey to another (left/right) are indistinguishable, and therefore ontologically the same. Buddhism is the failed discovery of the "self" - an inward asceticism turned outward to embrace the world. Outward as the result of emptiness/Sunyata (no essence implying no self) and dependent co-arising, where the only power to reality is found in our reciprocal, reversible symbiosis amongst man and nature. Whatever "essences" there are must be illusory, derivative of the externality of relations and its expressed power in-itself as background of the world. Here, the Buddhists are immune to the criticism that they conflate epistemy (what we can know) with ontology (what there is), neither is there a chicken or egg problem since Buddhist logic tolerates contradictions. If we were to use the pseudo-problem posed by analytic philosophy, the tree did and did not fall. In fact, we can say that the falling is real, but the tree is not. Whether the tree instantiates the property/condition of falling depends on observation. We observe states of affairs, and assign objects with what they undergo (of course, through parallel convergence and corroboration with other observers). We do not observe but perceive events. But where does this perception come from without the self? Perception therefore is universal, just like falling or crying or "green-ing", and no object or being owns or is the origin of it (independent of the particular that instantiates it). As Heidegger lamented, it is language that insists on the subject before the predicate. The possibility for analytic contradiction only arises when the object or thing is spoken to have instantiated the property/condition... ignoring the fact that the latter comes prior to the former. The world is thus a constellation of events (expressed as the pure 'infinitive' or verb(s)), while what we call the self is the product of the confluence of universal non-human forces that come together to define its being (the fleeing, the weeping, ...).

"We never really know if the scenes are occurring in the man's mind or the woman's. There is a perpetual oscillation between the two. You could even maintain that everything is told from her viewpoint." - Resnais

"The entire story of Marienbad happens neither in two years nor in three days, but exactly in one hour and a half." - Robbe-Grillet

The iconic freeze frame encapsulates the "time-image" in which moments of the past and future coexist (THE PRIORITY OF EVENTS), where memory and external reality are as indistinguishable and therefore as real as each other, and pre-consciousness is an infinite repeated loop. More adequately, we can say that events are most prior followed by the emergence of images (and the concomitant birth of the subject - its frame of reference), and finally the percept of time (it's own time, not Time). In this nebulous zone prior to the subject and time, all events are coexistent and are predestined to repeat/recur for eternity. Whilst Robbe Grillet frames Marienbad as a story of subjective psychosexual purgatory where the frozen present is assailed by the past and future, Resnais creates in filmic form the metaphysical grounds of reality that precede our conscious activity. This pre-conscious or pre-representational stage resembles that of a universal memory, one which is composed of pure affective images.

Most films that explore the relationship of subjectivity with time still hold onto an outdated theory of reality. In these films, our limited and flawed experience plays out in a non-linear manner but external reality itself is objective and time flows in a linear way, established independent of experience. In Resnais film, the opposite is actually the case - objective reality is itself non-linear (events precede the emergence of time - the first encounter, the rendezvous, the escape all have happened and will happen) whilst subjective memory filters and sorts events out into a linear fashion (the subject does not express temporality, the subject IS temporality). What we already grasp as reality has to be, and cannot be otherwise, arranged in chronological order, yet we are given no clue as to whose perception or recollection is being presented as fact. Are we inhabiting the world of X or A, or maybe both? Is this X's attempt to retrospectively justify to himself an outcome which has already happened? Or is this A's premonition of her dilemma between staying or leaving, while slowly being seduced and convinced by X? How much of what is perceived is desired/willed into existence as opposed to what there is? Make no mistake - the world of Marienbad is no more solipsistic than the fact that memory isn't purely the active creation of the individual subject but rather the subject is the ive by-product of a universal memory, where shared images composed of different rhythms bleed so seamlessly into one another that it is impossible to tell where one begins and ends, or where one's perception (X) is distinct from another's (A).

Last Year at Marienbad sets up and acts out the process for us. If the image is not the content of consciousness but its structure, then the process of repetition (both narrative and visual) is the image of thought. The object of thought is the representation of its image. Narration and visuals which were out-of-sync slowly come into consistency, before breaking off midway again. Frequently, X describes an event that presumably took place in the past (such as A breaking the heel of her shoe), and the visuals show us either a different action or later reveal the same action with A dressed in clothes from the "present." Thus it is impossible for the spectator to determine whether these scenes take place in the past, present, or imagination. There is no way to establish an independent point-of-view or at least an Archimedean observation. Instead, our inter-subjective conscious lives revolve around images which are themselves atemporal and in a sense, eternal. There is no start and end - everything that has ever occurred will continue to occur on a single flat plane in the middle. The multitude of photographs X took of A revealed in the drawer utterly horrifies X (return of the repressed) because it reminds him that the story has already repeated itself for an indefinite number of times. To echo Deleuze contra Freud, we don't repeat (the same actions) because we repress; but we repress because we repeat.

What is the Image? Between the object and thought lies the image. The image is not a representation or a thing. Neither is the image the product of conscious thought. The image connects the object and its thought, and is the foundation for both to emerge. Every image is a composite - of differential forces and energies that manifest in movement and action respectively. But most importantly, the image is a set of timeless events that persist and outlive the individual subject. What is significant are events, which are not ordinary moments but threshold points marking two different phase states (like between a horse trottle and a gallop, or water becoming steam at 100deg, or the first encounter, or the rendezvous to escape...). Events are the fundamental constituents of reality. Nothing can exist outside of reality by its definition. If time is nothing but a measure of change between two different speeds/becomings, then it is an empty concept that is superimposed onto reality by a perceiving subject. Reality itself is timeless (zero or infinite time). Now, coexistence of events alludes to the static block of time. Simply put, due to the finite speed of light, observers in different frames of reference will necessarily disagree on the simultaneity of events. General relativity (GR) explicitly states, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that neither reference frame is privileged in any way, utterly abolishing the Newtonian concept of a "universal present moment" or "now". It means the so-called "future" and "past" exist, simultaneously. There is, quite simply, no logical ground to think that your "present" moment is all that exists. All moments in time exist, equally real. This leads us to a rather profound conclusion that the supposed origin of the universe to its final death, has occurred/is occurring/will occur, and the universal (pre)-consciousness is like an infinitely repeated tape, akin to Morel's island in Bioy Casares novel. The pre-conscious is therefore a continuous uninterrupted flow of images.

Resnais has emphatically insisted that the film plays out not in 2 years or 3 days but 90mins (the exact run-time of the film), hence there can be no separation of fact from fiction, no outside to what is already given. If we take X as a mathematical variable, then its consciousness is inherently empty and is nothing apart from the shared images that through and affect it. Last Year at Marienbad thus presents to us images which are freed from the subject and of time. The meaning of such images are already saturated/contaminated by desire and one cannot possibly separate, except in theory, the wish-fulfilment/desire-projection aspect from images which are stripped of desire. Desires are universal, but the atomic self is not and in fact we can say that the preconscious is a bundle of perceptions (Hume) without an organizer. The universe of Marienbad is our actual reality that we are thrust into, as real as the opening theatre play spectated by X and A that mirrors what has already and will unfold. The game of life against death (embodied by the constant M) involves an infinite set of repeatable games with its societal rules, risks, competition, deception, where the only way "out"/"escape" is to be forced to make the throw-of-the-dice (Mallarmé). It is here where we return to Nietzsche's beseeching cry for Amor Fati and the love of fate that reminds us, in spite of what discontinuous consciousness tempts us to believe in deterministic laws that ultimately it is chance, randomness and luck right at the bottom whereby the outcome cannot be known or calculated prior to the necessity of making the decision. We cannot pick and choose parts of what is desirable from non-desirable - must embrace the entirety of the past. The Eternal Recurrence is the willing for the return of all images (and non-discrimination for all actualized outcomes). Hence we are not only affirming the necessity of history, but the necessity of chance behind everything (amor fati). We affirm the difference that chance makes at every moment for eternity. What returns is therefore not the Same, but difference and openness to novelty. Ultimately, Last Year at Marienbad is about the eternal return of images.

When we recall the "past", we also actively re-create reality. Isn't this the very nature of existence itself? To ward off the forgetfulness of death (without-sun) is to constantly put disjunctive images together into some sort of resonance; life as the tracings of linings (remembrance) that impress upon memory. Remembrance is no more active than it is the work of the unconscious, insofar as forgetting is no less ive than one chooses or wills not to . From this we can make sense of Marker's quote that memory consists of liminal, threshold surfaces rather than the depths of substantive spaces.

By inquiring into this process, the recall itself becomes a time of memory (time) about the memory of time (remembrance). Hence there are, working in tandem, no less than 2 series of time occurring that result in a spiral-like effect - the perceiver's time and the perceived time. The manner in which images are put together carries a rhythm (time) as much as what those images intend to represent (the time of the events in the past).

But then each of these 2 series is composed of further series. From the point of view of the perceiver, the numerous films that we watch remind us that there are other times which are manifested in these other films. Each director's vision carries its own time. We may even say that our perception is shaped/influenced by the perceptions of others - this is multiplied in the age of media. From the point of the perceived, objects undergo their own speeds and therefore their own respective time. For example, supposedly sedimentary rocks settling under a stream of current have their rates of becoming which interact with the rate of waterflow around them, the "time" of the river thus emerges out of the interaction between two (or more) rates of becoming.

How then can fragments resonate with one another? Is there some sort of miracle like life itself that binds them together momentarily and cause them to resonate into synchronicity? How does order emerge from random chaos? The answer perhaps, can be found in similar masterpieces of literature (T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets; Proust's In Search of Lost Time) - Desire. It is desire that brings together these separate images with their own rates of flow. The past that was and the past that could have been. These are intertwined in memory, in consciousness. Isn't this the basis for why we watch film?

The Act of Killing is first and foremost a film about conscience. Is conscience that interval between the event and its re-presentation; the moment before one can say "i've acted/done" and on the precipice of the event? Certainly, it challenges the idea of moral realism to its breaking point - we often hear a post hoc justification for the act (following orders, ignorance, out of one's control), but in a society where the winners are extolled as heroes there isn't any need for a justification or explanation. That is why the filmmaker's attempt to insert conscience between the recognition of killing and its act, to separate effect/consequence from cause/act through the process of repetition, in faint hope that some form of conscience will be able to emerge out of the perpetuator's psyche, can only go so far as to elicit a regurgitation, nothing more than a (staged) regurgitation of the event. As a work of interventionist cinema (ie. to directly change the beliefs of the participants), The Act of Killing is an abject failure, albeit a necessary one, in uttering to us a pessimistic conclusion shattering the common sense belief that moral values are independent of power.

The body as the site where forces of chaos (random chance) clash with the ideal image (soul). Faith is the hope for a perfect marriage with the other/void that requires the making Whole of. Christian theology has gotten it the other way round - there's no reunion because there never was a Whole that later became split, only the false illusions of the other's double that demand domestication and assimilation. Possession, then, is not about evil entering and corrupting what was once good, or splitting and turning the Whole against itself, but about the impossible faith of making Whole what never was by erecting an idol/God to worship as the ideal image. The solution is to expel, not assimilate, the ideal image from one's body (the infamous subway scene actually depicts an expulsion rather than a possession), and to prevent this monstrous (Christian) God/ the other's doppelganger from re-entering the abode of the body.

Memories open up time in space, where exactly the same inhabited spaces remain unchanged in their tranquil stillness as they were before but the return of the past makes them appear uncanny and deeply affecting. The phantasmic light that envelops every frame with shimmering translucence illustrates the co-existence of memory-tinged spaces with each present moment. Severing time (of thought) from space (of action), she re-enters the past not to search for reasons/explanations as a form of closure, but to allow it to wash over and guide her towards acceptance of a new life - the same titular glow that had driven her husband to death.

Watched on Thursday July 27, 2023.

It is conceivable that we share the same thoughts and feelings as someone else, that every move we make simultaneously diverges from instances in many possible worlds and also continues to remain coherent in an infinite set of parallel realities. And if we were to simply collapse all these universes into one, and let it run for an infinite time, then we shall find the existence of someone indistinguishable from us, who has gone through the same experiences as us. We think knowledge of this person will allow us to eliminate chance and control our own fate. But fate and chance are two sides of the same coin. Fate as the outcome which cannot have happened otherwise - Zizek said that Veronique's present state is haunted by all the untaken possibilities, but possibilities are only retrospectively conferred. Outcomes are "under-determined" by preceding events, for there will always be the indeterminacy of chance that cannot be resolved prior to their actualization. The reciprocal relationship between Veronique and Weronika is that of an Entanglement rather than direct causality. There are no underlying essences which pre-determine each of their respective beings (as Bell's theorem rules out Einstein's hidden variables theory). Rather, entangled relationships are correlations without causation (hence no "spooky" action at a distance or faster-than-light transference needed) that precede the determinate state of both beings, such that while their individual natures are ontologically distinct/discrete they nonetheless are phenomenologically inseparable - both women share the same experiences (the simulated double). These shared experiences are tied to the repeating motifs of strings in the film.

It takes the imaginative brilliance of this film to completely subvert causation or causal determinacy from the picture. What we are left with are effects - resemblances, reflections, associations, convergences, etc.

"Intuition is not duration itself. Intuition is rather the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm and immediately to recognize the existence of other durations, above or below us." - Deleuze

While Dog Star Man can be read in of representation (what objects certain images correspond to in the real world), symbolism (femininity: moon to breast, Christianity: babies head to glass of Madonna) or metaphor (the myth of self-actualization and spiritual rebirth), it is first and foremost a work of aesthetics which directly implicates the spectator in the constitution of its own images. At its core, Dog Star Man is about what comes prior to and enables the condition of possibility for representation, symbolism and metaphor - the genesis of perception.

All perception emerges through a process of repetition and pattern-formation at a preconscious level. Dog Star Man is not a silent film, for it expresses the same mechanisms composing sound as that which constitute image. There are no pre-given figures; their emergence can only rely on fractured micro-perceptions (pure Affect/Sense/Flesh) that must construct both itself (the eye) and the external world (the mind's eye). Brakhage refuses the distinction between interior and exterior. Hence, their respective geneses can be said to be equivalent - the emergence of the world comes about in the same way as our perception of it. Before sedimentation of the concept (tree, green, waves), we have to rely on both habit and memory in order to make sense of perception. Habit comes about when we extract and contract a series of micro-sensations (AB, AB, AB) in order to perceive discrete/distinct patterns within perception itself, such that the emergence of A is closely followed by B. Simultaneously the present habit is supplemented by the past memory of concepts such that our perception of discrete repetitions is recognized as falling under that of the general concept. Brakhage suspends the second function (memory) so that our minds are now freed to form associations (AC, AC, AC). Free interplay and association generate shapes/forms instead of being overdetermined by them - how do our eyes unlearn, to teach it forgetfulness, to untrain it so as to perceive the field of "greening" instead of green. Indeed, the field of relations is presented not just to the human eye, but also that of the dog, the wind, etc. By juxtaposing different perceptions, Brakhage reveals multiple planes (and worlds) in which objects interact with one another by adopting non-localizable "shots" to show the inherent omni-perception in nature. Whether this entails us subscribing to panpsychism is not as relevant or interesting as the call for eternal creation. Not the creation of eternity, but need of the perpetual creation that is fundamental to reality. The question becomes no longer whether concepts latch onto our perceptions in a reliable way, but how do we create concepts from the infinite relations that can be obtained from perception. What cinema is all about, and needs to do, is an acceleration of repetition in order to continuously create new forms, and also the simultaneous deconstruction of familiar concepts. An explosive work of expressionism.

"This place is a tomb."

Video-games become life as the map sures and substitutes itself for reality. A film about lines, vectors, coordinates which traces movement as geometric rather than substantive. Instead of the cinematic cross-cut that implicates movement, the whole topography is already given in Anderson's universe(s). Movement in its pure form is the goal in itself - to get from Point A to B, nothing more or less where the rules of the game emerge only after trial and navigation, not beforehand. To always be on the move, adapting to the ever-changing natural laws of the universe which are given yet undefined, we recall Mallarmé as he wrote of existence as a dice throw which never annuls chance. The world is hostile insofar as substantive flesh becomes deconstructed and reconfigured as it es through thresholds around singularities. Flesh as beholden to formal structures governed by the logic of attractors and oscillators. That's why hell can only be represented as an (visceral) effect rather than as a metaphor or analogy, and its literal depiction which many of the film's critics mistake as a flaw.

Man assailed by tribalism, by an implicit external entity/force, by his own kind, by his own creation (technology), by the Unknown, and yet he must overcome himself by immanence. Through its visual motifs and cross-cutting, Kubrick has created a film which reflects the ontological equality of objects. Multiple shots of the same scene but from non-human angles serve to emphasize the diminution of humans, affording us the pervasive omniscient presence of objects. Expressing subjectivity through pure objectivity using visual motifs of the line and circle, straight lines delineate the seemingly deterministic point-of-view of its characters, only to be undercut by spiraling/rotating circles indicating that such lines from a distance ultimately loop back upon themselves in an endless cycle of Being (ie. the acceptance of the whole process itself is the repetition of eternal recurrence). An internal journey as much as an external one, its the eternal return of Zarathustra as the wide-eyed innocent child of pure openness that embraces difference itself by affirming the totality of Being/existence, after the first two movements of the burden borne out of our evolutionary past (the camel) and rebellion/critique of what it inherits (the lion).

All cinema is essentially politically active documentary. The camera tasked with bringing the problematic to life - to draw upon sensation and Ideas on the plane of the suppressed unconscious (hidden in plain sight as another reviewer aptly describes), and to gather them into resonance and past the threshold of consciousness. That's why its more accurate to say that an artist begins with a violent extraction. All of the world already exists on the blank canvas, and the role of the artist is to tease and carve out the world - to re-present the world by turning it inside out and emptying it. Hence insofar as the concept of "objectivity" assumes an impartial observer, then cinema would forever remain deficient - a pale reflection and imitation of a higher transcendent reality which it could never attain (the artist is powerless and paralyzed in front of his empty canvas). Whereas insofar as the concept of "subjectivity" guaranteed cinema's active role in the creation of the problematic, with the artist of the milieu being moved and forced to rid the contents of his "blank" canvas of cliche, to re-present the world without falling into predictable or pre-arranged patterns, then cinema itself would become worthy of valuation and appraisal.

Upon this cosmic canvas of existence, what we call 'life' is nothing but it a constellation of forces that oscillates between the poles of disorder and consistency. The universe has one universal law - the law of indeterminacy. Inexplicable events randomly arise and re-structure the existing configuration of reality, only to dissipate as abruptly as their emergence. Singular events are already incipient in relatively harmonious states, whose eruption onto the "status quo" may appear to be external (the Prince) but are always internal to any meta-stable system (micro-fascisms).

The film opens with what I consider to be the greatest scene in the history of cinema by connecting the particular with the universal; linking the local and the nonlocal. On a quantifiable scale it shows the cosmic significance that has always existed and can be located in the quotidian. On a metaphysical level, its a choreography of the genesis of life. From what seems to be the purely indistinct and random movements of inconsistency emerge a pattern of repetition, consistency and discreteness. A sea of chaos synchronizes and resonates into a meta-stable order before dissolving back once again into oblivion. One might mistake this order as perfect or always desirable. Yet the irony is that it is during one particular brief moment of such order / ie. the Order of orders (the temporary "perfect" alignment of planets which causes the darkness of eclipse) that the most catastrophic of events would emerge. This is a premonition of later sequences to come, whereby the arrival of the Whale is foreshadowed by the metaphorical eclipse. Werckmeister Harmonies reveals the grounds of the political are actually fundamentally metaphysical in nature.

There's a thread that connects Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies with Arendt. The origins of Evil are not actually the deeds of dangerously charismatic men with grandiose ideas about how to bring order to society, but rather the micro-fascisms within us all and of how society can sleepwalk itself into the allures of totalitarianism. The tendency of subjects to take their daily labour and concerns within the private sphere as main/sole sources of meaning to Life (whose stake lies in the public realm of pluralism and deliberation). When pessimism towards Life takes root, that's when restless and despondent subjects are organized by totalitarian ideologies which promise to deliver one final solution. In essence, the celebration of the meaninglessness of everything is precisely the negation of Life which leads to nihilism.

There are at least 2 singularities in the film - the Whale and the naked man in the shower room. Both mark thresholds between two unique phases of nature, almost like strange attractors/oscillators which designate a dramatic change in the system of flows. The Whale is the Leviathan, an imposing figure of awe and authority, but nonetheless "dead" - because its power is composed of the totality of the townspeople (the Hobbesian image). This image of order (of something larger than Life itself) galvanizes the people into violence with the idea of restoring meaning into the aimless lives of the downtrodden village people. Like water that boils and transforms into steam, a disturbance that reconfigures the constellation of all elements in the system and persists in another meta-stable state (albeit of pure violence and destruction) until the sudden emergence of the lonesome figure of a naked elderly man in a hospital, the sign of pure naked vulnerability, who exists as nothing more than a pure Affect. Both singularities are quasi-causes, since they do not directly cause the incitement/dispelling of a highly charged state of affairs, but instead indirectly signal the transition from one phase to another. Similar to how 100 degrees Celsius at 1 atm is not the cause of water to boil, but rather the designation and representation for the boiling of H2O. Afterall, the Leviathan and naked man are not merely things-in-themselves but a physical representation of their respective Idea and Affect.

In a more cryptic scene expounding musical theory, a character laments the hubris that modern musicologists have vis-a-vis the ancient greeks. Maintaining that his analysis is not technical but philosophical, he proceeds to give a genealogy of the development of tonality. While the greeks were contented with their limited use of tuning to produce consistent melodies, the moderns inspired by the Enlightenment believed they could achieve the expression of totality by increasingly the range of tones in their instruments. However, the ratios between notes are no longer 100% pure. So if the interval between two notes is a fifth, the ratio of the frequencies of the tones (in Hertz) is not the perfect 1,5, but something like 1,4983... In effect, he's saying that the harmonies that Werckmeister dreamt of are illusory, just like any utopic dream for a theory of everything. We can somewhat understand this analogy with Gödel Incompleteness Theorems and the necessary tradeoff between completeness and consistency. While the ancient greeks opted for consistency and purity, without minding about completeness, modern music culminates in Werckmeister who wanted to express totality while remaining consistent (which as Gödel demonstrates is an impossibility). This is an allegory of totalitarian ideologies, which naively insist on their coherence to dissolve all political problems - but when they express totality they must become inconsistent and internally contradictory.

What should be our healthy relationship towards chaos? If all order is born out of disorder, and not the other way around (as what Platonism "deviation from perfect forms" to Christian "original sin/fall from grace" to Enlightenment "mind that comprehends the determinism of fixed transcendent laws behind everything" worldviews express), ultimately what matters is to acknowledge the inexhaustible well of energies in excess of what is given/perceived (and the pure randomness at the heart of nature itself) while taking guard against organising such forces into coagulated fascistic forms engendered by the forces of resentment (Nietzsche attributes the denial of life to reactive forces like nihilism). Sedimentation occurs when certain principles emerge and seek to order/govern all the spontaneous randomized drives once and for all, while disregarding the infinite potentialities of nature upon which it draws, and to which it owes its existence.

The self is but a ive outcome of a multiplicity of desires.

Analyze the nature of dreams and one always encounters all the characters one has met in different times of one's life. In dreams we always feel like a spectator to the events which unfold upon us, surrendering to the will of our own predominant desires. Every character within a dream is inflected through heightened emotions as a result of the "self" becoming vulnerable and allowing senses and signs to through it. Dreams are the battleground on which the problematic situation galvanizes different conflicting desires to "resolve" themselves. Mulholland Drive is about the meta-structure of dreams, and the way in which dreams appear to play out as a coping response of the self not as a unitary unit but as a multiplicity of selves. In dreams these (larval)-selves are not tied down and related back to the 'I' but are left to freely revolve around events/situations which the dreamer has experienced before.

To dream, therefore, is not to freely create fantasies from a set of pre-given personages, let alone the self choosing to construct a make-belief narrative at its own discretion, but is always already a response to a problematic situation around which the fragmented self's personages coalesce. These personages are larval selves, each an expression of a pure mood - composed as a particular set of mutually reinforcing desires. That's why disillusioned Diane projects her conflicting senses onto Rita (complicated as Camilla) and Betty, the former as an innocent vulnerable lover whose amnesia requires her care & nurture as a guise to exercise/retain some form of her fledgling control over, while the latter as her idealized self - the self that she could never be (confident and successful). Matters become complicated by a casting director whose reason to reject her application, as the situation plays out in her dream, is not due to her failures but because of his personal tryst with another actress. It's the latent self fractured & manifested as different separate personages reflecting different personas, distinct and problematic (oftentimes too transparent and one-dimensional as in the case of Rita), all of which revolve around disparate situations/events.

One may even say that each person that appears in our dreams is nothing but an archetype or expression of a mutually reinforcing set of emotions (just as a character in a fictional film) that serves to PROBLEMATIZE real-life situations in which specificity is confused because the unconscious is a bundle of split-selves that are non-spatial and atemporal. Time and place are often suspended, characters disappear and reappear at different points of the dream seemingly at convenience sake as the only logic of desire is in their struggle to reinforce and annihilate one another (attraction vs repelling), while the conscious self is a spectator to forces that sustain or give rise to it. What we call awareness then, is when certain desires reach an intensive resonance and cross into the threshold of consciousness. For example, the desire to express my ideas in this review vs other subterranean desires that pull me to get a drink or to sleep, which are already present but have not prevailed... yet.

Watched on Friday April 21, 2023.

Watched on Friday April 21, 2023.

Watched on Friday April 21, 2023.

Watched on Friday April 21, 2023.

Watched on Friday April 21, 2023.

The Color of Pomegranates is a radical film because it shows us what the logical conclusion of an orthodox Christian reality is like. Instead of beginning from The Real, it begins right at the end - where at the end of man's life all that remains are the persistent symbols which define his being. Here only symbols proliferate while the Real is severed/untethered from all connections with the phenomenal world. Symbolic representation is a hermetically and hermeneutically sealed world unto itself, where the intransigent signs directly communicate with the soul of the individual (in this case, Sayat-Nova), but from the outside the biographer is left with the abundance of symbols which hang together, revolve, oscillate and circulate one another in an empty space. This is a total break from dialectical materialism that subordinates progress to the linear age of time. Here an individual's life is defined neither by space and time nor bodily movement, but is now liberated and free to express its relation to the signs it receives. Upon death, the enlightened soul is fully laid out into still symmetrical tableaux. The illusion of depth is replaced by the equality of two-dimensional surfaces, for such a life can be both witnessed forwards and backwards. Iconoclastic.

Watched on Wednesday March 17, 2021.

Watched on Sunday February 14, 2021.

The singular event* that erupts at the end has often been characterized as a brief, momentary (re-)assertion of one's autonomy from the oppressive mundanity of labour - an emancipatory albeit destructive act. There is however a sense that Seyrig feels most at ease when she is precisely going through her chores inattentively, whereas the few moments that punctuate - those scenes where she literally does "nothing"/being out-of-sync with her mundane routines - are also those where she appears to be at her most tense (a testament to how far capitalist ideology has cultivated a sense of freedom through endless work). This alters the meaning of the ending to be far bleaker than one which can be calculated in of repercussions. Instead of a triumphant break-out from the cycle of domestic servitude, the after-effect of the act dissipates further highlighting that Seyrig can never manage to escape from both her geo-spatial & mental patterns of behavior.

More instructively, I think the film draws to our attention that mood & emotions are not something that reside internally within us but take on their existence via the affection of objects around us. No matter how close the camera invades Seyrig's private space, or how long the static frame attempts to confine her, it can never capture the existence of her feelings. Their implied existence do not come prior to their expression through the minutiae changes in habit and orientation of said objects. Expression, explication, habit, disposition, attunement - these are the key features of existence which come prior to any sort of cognitive reflection that retrospectively imputes a mental state of affairs. In this regard, Dielman is more like a dance than a film by foregrounding the embodied-ness of Seyrig and the audience.

Besides presenting to the viewer an externalist view of the psyche, the film also broaches an ontological issue related to Heidegger's concept of "un-ready-to-hand" which describes our fundamental encounter of the world as being perpetually mediated by the modes of familiarity/unfamiliarity. This epistemic tension is underpinned by the corresponding Heideggerian duality of concealment/un-concealing. Our default engagement with the world is marked by familiarity, where the world is actually concealed from us. Heidegger's call-to-being is a necessarily unnerving one as it is marked by a sudden/abrupt unheimlichkeit in which the world un-conceals or "reveals" itself to us. Yet, for every revealing (the product/consciousness), there is also a simultaneous concealing of the grounds of being (the process/pre-conscious). We can say that the pre-conscious grasps the process of becoming, is in tune with the world in flux, and therefore is the closest to Nature before it is differentiated/bifurcated into Cartesian subject and scientific object.

Seyrig becoming unattuned to her familiar world of habitual dispositions mirrors that of the audience noticing the changes in her rhythmic patterns of behavior. For Seyrig, heretofore familiar objects oppose and resist her grasp, unconcealing their presence to her. For the audience, a series of seemingly ordinary routines becomes transformed by a singular event, which then forces a re-evaluation of the entire preceding sequence that used to by unnoticed - a veritable analogy for the history of all forms of oppression, and also of life in general.

What is truly disquieting is this: by objectifying Seyrig as a domestic subject to be studied, she actually disappears into the mis-en-scene/background like a cog in the wheel of domesticity. The revelation of the extent of her entrapment becomes apparent through the very same mis-en-scene that enables her emergence from it, like a being that flickers into and out of existence. The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty calls this site of encounter the reversibility of Flesh, where in-betweenness is not something derived secondarily from pre-given fully-formed objects but is the original plane of encounter with the world that has yet to be constituted as "things"/"objects".

*Event: An effect that exceeds its own causes, which retroactively determines its own causes, and that we only makes sense of after its emergence. A rupture that breaks from its linear trajectory timeline - it creates its own path. At its most elementary, event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it.

Update: Clearly this masterpiece has resonated with our post-pandemic sentiments. A few points which I feel are worth emphasizing (again) - the most obvious one being that contrary to common opinion I do not believe that Dielman endorses the private interiority or hidden depths of psyche. Even the viewpoint that the psyche's existence is retrospectively inferred or implicated is a mistaken one because we only witness DIFFERENCES in habitual movement, nothing more and nothing less. This is a film that revolves around the relationship or Sense between Dielman and her space, which exists as a set of foreground/background (unconcealing/concealing) thresholds. The subject and object only emerge as a consequence rather than origins of such spaces. More instructively, Dielman's preconscious habits parallel that of the audience who only observes and realizes the changes in behavior which is always already blind to her. The preceding events that occur in the first two days only (re)surface to our consciousness and acquire significance due to that singular event of the third day. As third-person observers, we are ourselves blind to most of our own preconscious actions just like Dielman to hers. Dare I say Akerman's film comes the closest to charting the preconscious life which is characterized not by individual thought and actions, but by bodily patterns and dispositions. In short, Being-in-the-world as a fundamental ontology about our primordial encounter with reality.

The will of man reflected in his hands and inner voice - of description and of expression. This is not dualism but a Spinozist parallelism that correlates the visible image (of the present) and the invisible sound (of the past & future) without collapsing one into the other. When we observe that the Bressonian style is 'austere', what we mean is that he traces out the material and the ideal that form the two parts of reality. The material is the image of the present - static, unchanging, matter-of-fact (harsh even as depicted in A Man Escaped)... always haunted by the ideal, the sounds and voices which arrive from past and future. Thus believing as much in the action as in the thought of men, he also believed in the image as in the sound of cinema.

Watched on Thursday August 27, 2020.

At first glance one wonders what a committed leftist/Marxist like Watkins, dedicated to emphasizing man's social conditions over the individual's private life, might have to say about Expressionism. As this docu-drama unfolds it soon becomes clear - if Impressionism is directed towards objects from the perspective of a singular point of view, Expressionism is of/about the world by the artist not as a unified being but fragmented as micro-sensibilities shaped by milieus. The difference is crucial. While heretofore works of art extol perspectives, with vision as the privileged sensation, expressionism replaces depth with surfaces. Surfaces of sensations which cut across and traverse that which comes prior to what we define as interior self and exterior world. In this regard Expressionism as a whole deals with the universal because their expressions lack discrete objects of reference (the expressed) and discrete subject (that who expresses). To arrest sensation in itself, or pure expression, that is neither the product of subject nor object but their pre-condition - Munch's art as shown to be the product of events that seize him throughout his life; the expression of the totality of events as pure sensation.

+ Der Schrei der Natur is often interpreted as a depiction of the subject's scream causing the trembling of nature around him, but that is an incomplete picture if we ignore the full title which indicates rather that it is a scream reverberating across nature that stirs up the subject. His contorted facial expression is one of an effect rather than cause of the scream (Affect), such that the reaction becomes indistinguishable from the scream itself (unknown origins). Both the self and the world are the background which only emerge from the Scream itself.

The precession of the simulacra where images dizzy the subject and drive it to reproduce the signs associated with the object. A world without depth but vertiginous surfaces that slip & slide. The feigning of the depths where there is none - Scottie's condition is not just metaphorical but literal. The more he sought to manipulate the signs of his object of desire, the more he falls victim to them. Such is the death drive - both a repulsion and fascination by what it cannot obtain. Scottie's compulsion to repeat and recreate/refashion events and appearances, as if he could somehow overcome his condition by exorcising its spell, so that he could "reach out" (again, literally) to save his perceived object of desire that we soon find out to not have existed in the first place is ultimately a fascination of his own psychophysical condition.

Or does Scottie's fascination with his condition also serve as a meta-commentary on cinephilia? Like us, he is not in love with Judy but rather her image(s) (modeled after a dead Madeline who in turn is said to be possessed by the returning spirit of her great-grandmother). Afterall his first encounter of Judy is actually through a painting in the museum. The clever framing also draws our attention to the painting first, such that it (Carlotta) becomes identified with "Madeline"; an image modeled after another image. What could she possibly be staring at that is so alluring? Hitchcock's reply is that the living are always already encountered as "dead" images, be it the murdered, the doppelganger, the ghost or the artwork. Of course the illusory depths are more alluring than the living (eg. Midge). The novel on which the film is based alludes to it being a retelling of the Orpheus & Eurydice myth, except that there never was a real person in need of rescue.

The ending suggests that one never breaks free from the spiral without the death of either object of desire or oneself. As Richard Brody remarked, Scottie "overcoming" his condition is the same as his realization that Judy wasn’t merely his simulacrum of Madeleine but was one and the same. It is at this moment that Judy becomes superseded by her own double rather than her own guilt (the nun does not symbolize her conscience but the return of her phantasm - the signs of Madeline). Clearly she has so successfully stepped into her role that the singular event of the feigned suicide overwhelms her, preventing her from distinguishing discrete entities. The feigned or the virtual becomes actual.

Hitchcock's genius was his astute recognition that desire never resides in the depths but always on the surfaces of bodies. The condition of postmodernity - nothing behind the mask/sign but more masks/signs which stand in for the object of desire. Cinema has produced many masterpieces but Vertigo is quite possibly the one which we can all agree on as the Ulysses of film, not only in of critical acclaim it has garnered but also as a radical work of art.

Watched on Friday July 31, 2020.

Watched on Thursday July 30, 2020.

What is love? To love is to engage in and recreate the signs emitted by our object of desire. These are the multiple worlds which affect and shape the person whom we love, and we believe that by willingly immersing ourselves with them, attuning our whole beings to them, we somehow are able to connect with the Real person. How many times have we listened to the same music, willingly consumed the same food or frequent the same places that our beloved has? We all wish to be affected by the same signs that also affect our object of desire (resonance and synchronicity). That's why Hsiao-Kang connects with his object of desire through recreating the experiences of Parisian life - by tuning his clock to the time of Paris, he also simultaneously block out others who attempt to establish some form of connection with him such as the advances of a stranger in the cinema, nor does his mother pay any attention to him in her own obsession over the signs of her dead husband whom she vicariously preserves in the form of the whole apartment as if the husband was still living. Not realizing that we fall prey to the signs the more we try to manipulate them, as in Hitchcock's Vertigo where Scottie's hunt makes it apparent that he is more of the hunted (induced dizziness by the signs of Madeleine) than the hunter of Madeleine. The end result only marks the "death" of the real object of desire - the real Madeleine that is killed rather than her preceding simulacrum, or in the case of Tsai's films whereby his characters can inhabit the same geographic space and time but exist phenomenologically elsewhere with their phantasms. Tsai's greatest film, and also one of the most romantic of all films.

“That the people are missing means they require an enabling image that can summon them into existence.. If there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: that the people no longer exist, or not yet.. the people are missing.” - Deleuze

Words as leaving behind corporeal effects on material bodies. These episodes cover three aspects of language. 1) language as the perpetual movement from heterogeneity to homogeneity, the eternal strive towards understanding 2) language as the (literal) birth of the new; an incomprehensible excess that calls for poetry/new vocab 3) language as functional like a toolbox, it's meaning is in its usages and purposes.

Watched on Thursday June 18, 2020.

Watched on Friday June 12, 2020.

Watched on Wednesday June 10, 2020.

Watched on Wednesday June 10, 2020.

Watched on Monday June 8, 2020.

Watched on Sunday June 7, 2020.

Watched on Tuesday June 2, 2020.

Watched on Tuesday May 26, 2020.

Watched on Tuesday May 26, 2020.

Watched on Tuesday May 26, 2020.

The most insightful film I've seen depicting deep seated suspicions that have been perpetuated by the prevailing socio-political codes and norms on those working in rural agrarian areas, and the inertia for implementing progressive policies designed by well-intended urban intelligentsia. We get to witness how the local elite and his group of ers ally themselves with the corporation and judicial chief, using every trick in the book (and outside) to stymie any form of collective ownership. Complex due to its subject matter and also different from Benegal's other films which typically focused on the theme of forbidden love. Possibly the director's best (and underseen) film.

The issue has never been about whether art is a reflection of reality, nor is it about its accuracy (or lack thereof)... The more interesting problem is to address the effects of a reflexive kind of cinema on life that is itself cinematic.

Kiarostami depicts cinema as striving for a definite representation of reality - when it demands names and addresses while touring the locale in between shoots. Moreover, Kiarostami critiques the role of a universal benevolent director who naively believes that he can portray a ive, unbiased and neutral reality. The "actors" or real-world people simply do not respect such boundaries drawn up by the artist. The point is that there is no such thing as a faithful representation of reality because in order to do so one must first define a clear line/boundary and that is simply impossible to begin with. Nobody can tell what is real from what is being represented*.

The ending has been misinterpreted as illustrating that art is beholden to reality itself and that the director is denied access to true reality (ie. the answer cannot be given on-screen but off-screen)*, when instead it highlights that there are no easy answers in reality so why do we expect an answer in film when film is already interwoven into reality?

*This distinction could only be made through film. To reinforce this point, we have been reminded at the beginning that what we are watching is "but" a film.

Watched on Monday May 18, 2020.

Do we live to shovel or do we shovel to live? The former implies that essence precedes existence, the latter existence precedes essence. A Heideggerian existentialism by showing that they are effectively equivalent and to posit one before the other is to already invoke an ontological claim (Heidegger's critique of Sartre). The conditions for existence are to be found in the world itself (Being=Doing).

Working on both a philosophical and socio-political level, the film depicts capitalism as a subconscious force that presents the appearance of freedom by always granting the possibility for "escape", but effectively wearing down its subject and forcing it to make the monogamous relationship work (now with added responsibility of providing for the child). By the end, the man believes he is free by choosing to stay but is not - he has derived meaning from the repetitive menial tasks placed on him by an outside world that observes him imively like the bugs he had wanted to manipulate. The disquieting fact of the matter is that our lives are not much different from the protagonist, fighting against the sands of time which threaten to engulf and bury us in eternity. There can be no transcendence - primal flesh is indistinguishable from nature, skin and sand undulating in unison. Our bodies cannot resist or go against the flow of nature or risk getting destroyed - indeed one should become nature by being in synchronicity with it, by attuning to its frequencies, to let the waves resonate through our corporeal bodies. Once we see all of Life as such, we return to the task of shovelling with a renewed sense of will and determination. And when we away, that mantle shall be ed onto our descendents, whom we have given our sweat and tears to love/protect.

Contrary to popular interpretation, this isn't any typical movie that retells the story from the angles of two different perspectives (man and woman) with slight variations based on each of their individual memories. The valorization of subjectivity is a stubbornly stupefying illusion that substitutes the notion of a single consistent and objective truth independent of perspective with the truth of the perspective itself. In either case, the grounds of the construction of truth remain concealed. For instance, there are several sequences in this film which lure the viewer into anticipating and projecting the outcome, without realizing that we are implicated in this very process - we are the ones who unwittingly determine what goes on in the film. Hong's films allow us to recognize the truth-constituting feature of our perspective. The truth lies in the meta-perspective itself - that we cannot help but decide for the characters what happened to them, and why whatever happens to them happened in such a manner.

So what is this new notion of subjectivity, called a meta-subjectivity, or the truth of subjectivity mean? What is the picture of the world that it entails? There isn't a consistent and unified subject but only fragmented "pre-subjects" which are the products of events that occur in randomized, unpredictable and coincidental fashion. It is only thereafter that the conscious self then retrospectively picks a collection of a few impressionable moments in linear order & succession through the application of its guiding intellect which employs the concepts of "reason"/"logical induction"/"cause and effect". Nevertheless, the background of events are already there, even ones which remain in the realm of the unperceived, ie. those that haven't crossed into the threshold of impressions. The repetition of scenes introduces differences and slight variations, but none of them are more "real" than the others. Hong's films enumerate multiple worlds that hang together; sequences and events which are all true simultaneously but which converge through the act of observation and analysis. These can be understood not as multiple trajectories indicating possibilities (what *could have* happened) branching off from the a single actual world, but moreso as parallel worlds with no causal efficacy between them.

As Bordwell puts it, "(The film) doesn't supply any subjective motivation for the disparities. It isn't that Jae-hun re a moment in their affair in one way, while Soo-jeong re it differently. Indeed, we have no reason to believe that the flashbacks represent the characters' memories at all. The scenes are presented in crisply numbered sections, as if they were items in an objective outline, or scenes in parallel worlds. Framed by the present-time scenes, the variants carry out Hong's concern with a pattern that can't be reduced to a dramatic structure." (from Bordwell's essay "Beyond Asian Minimalism: Hong Sangsoo's Geometry Lesson" )

Bunuel's world is a microcosm of how ideology, constituted by the bourgeoisie's linguistic games, has become so far detached from its material conditions. As an allegory of the impotent bourgeois class whose downfall could only be attributed to their own undoing, and of an outside world that could only peer from the outside in, watching, waiting helplessly. The bourgeoisie and proletariat have become so far estranged from each other that communication is impossible. Instead, participants of one game unconsciously follow its rules without realizing that they are pawns of ideology. It is through repetition that allows for escape - a rupture from within, the cycle repeats itself elsewhere within the religious game, perhaps only awareness of the moves that we have made unconsciously will help break us from the spell, but only temporarily.

In order of preference

1. Werckmeister Harmonies
2. Right Now, Wrong Then
3. Drive My Car
4. Winter Sleep
5. My Mister
6. Death in the Land of Encantos
7. Extraordinary Stories
8. What Time Is It There?
9. Past Lives
10. In Vanda's Room

A Personal Canon.

In chronological order.

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• Battleship Potemkin
• The General
• The ion of Joan of Arc
• M
• The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum
• The Shop Around the Corner
• Day of Wrath
• Children of Paradise
• Bicycle Thieves

...plus 91 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A Documentary Canon.

"Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning." - Clifford Geertz

1. Sans Soleil
2. Shoah
3. Minamata: The Victims and Their World
4. The Act of Killing
5. Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks
6. Near Death
7. Night and Fog
8. Welfare
9. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
10. The House Is Black

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My Chinese Film Canon

1. A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY / Edward Yang
2. PLATFORM / Jia Zhangke
3. TIE XI QU: WEST OF THE TRACKS / Wang Bing
4. THE BLUE KITE / Tian Zhuangzhuang
5. A CITY OF SADNESS / Hou Hsiao-hsien
6. IN THE HEAT OF THE SUN / Jiang Wen
7. A BORROWED LIFE / Wu Nien-Jen
8. OXHIDE / Liu Jiayin
9. A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE / Hou Hsiao-hsien
10. PEKING OPERA BLUES / Tsui Hark
11. A TOUCH OF SIN / Jia Zhangke
12. KARAMAY / Xu Xin
13. DAYS OF BEING WILD / Wong Kar-wai
14. SPRING IN A SMALL TOWN / Fei Mu
15. THE PUPPETMASTER / Hou Hsiao-hsien
16. CENTER STAGE / Stanley Kwan
17. GOODBYE, DRAGON INN / Tsai Ming-liang
18. FROZEN / Wang Xiaoshuai
19. TAIPEI STORY / Edward Yang
20. DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP / Jiang Wen
21. THE GODDESS / Wu Yonggang
22. FUCK CINEMA / Wu Wenguang
23. BLACK SNOW / Xie Fei
24. MY MEMORIES OF OLD BEIJING / Wu Yigong
25. KUEI-MEI, A WOMAN / Chang Yi
26. BOAT PEOPLE / Ann Hui
27. THE HOLE / Tsai Ming-liang
28. OXHIDE II / Liu Jiayin
29. KING OF THE CHILDREN / Chen Kaige
30. THIS LIFE OF MINE / Shi Hui
31. A SUMMER AT GRANDPA'S / Hou Hsiao-hsien
32. STILL LIFE / Jia Zhangke
33. THE TERRORIZERS / Edward Yang
34. CHRONICLE OF A CHINESE WOMAN / Wang Bing
35. THE ALLEY / Yang Yanjin
36. LAST TRAIN HOME / Lixin Fan
37. SEVENTEEN YEARS / Zhang Yuan
38. THE PEACH BLOSSOM LAND / Stan Lai
39. PETITION / Zhao Liang
40. RAISE THE RED LANTERN / Zhang Yimou
41. AUTUMN MOON / Clara Law
42. STREET ANGEL / Yuan Muzhi
43. YI YI: A ONE AND A TWO / Edward Yang
44. ROUGE / Stanley Kwan
45. POSTMAN / He Jianjun
46. THE 36TH CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN / Lau Kar-leung
47. THREE SISTERS / Wang Bing
48. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE / Wong Kar-wai
49. AH YING / Allen Fong
50. THE DAY THE SUN TURNED COLD / Yim Ho
51. DR. MA'S COUNTRY CLINIC / Cong Feng *
52. BUMMING IN BEIJING / Wu Wenguang
53. THE KING OF MASKS / Wu Tianming
54. SPARROW / Johnnie To
55. TWO STAGE SISTERS / Xie Jin
56. FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI / Hou Hsiao-hsien
57. BLIND MOUNTAIN / Li Yang
58. GRAIN IN EAR / Zhang Lu
59. A GIRL FROM HUNAN / U Lan
60. UNKNOWN PLEASURES / Jia Zhangke
61. SUMMER PALACE / Lou Ye
62. THE HORSE THIEF / Tian Zhuangzhuang
63. DUST IN THE WIND / Hou Hsiao-hsien
64. RAINING IN THE MOUNTAIN / King Hu
65. THE RIVER / Tsai Ming-liang
66. THE ARCH / Tang Shu Shuen
67. LITTLE CHEUNG / Fruit Chan
68. THE WORLD / Jia Zhangke
69. A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION / Edward Yang
70. SUMMER SNOW / Ann Hui
71. TUYA'S MARRIAGE / Wang Quanan
72. FALLEN ANGELS / Wong Kar-wai
73. ROUTINE HOLIDAY / Li Hongqi
74. AUTUMN EXECUTION / Lee Hsing
75. WINTER VACATION / Li Hongqi
76. GROWING UP / Chen Kun-ho
77. ERMO / Zhou Xiaowen
78. THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI / Hou Hsiao-hsien
79. JULY RHAPSODY / Ann Hui
80. SUZHOU RIVER / Lou Ye
81. BLIND SHAFT / Li Yang
82. RAINCLOUDS OVER WUSHAN / Zhang Ming
83. THE DITCH / Wang Bing
84. POSTMEN IN THE MOUNTAINS / Huo Jianqi
85. THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH / Edward Yang
86. PEACOCK / Gu Changwei
87. OLD WELL / Wu Tianming
88. THE OTHER HALF / Ying Liang
89. WOMAN SESAME OIL MAKER / Xie Fei
90. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT / Zhao Liang
91. THE SEARCH / Pema Tseden
92. 1428 / Du Haibin
93. NIGHT TRAIN / Diao Yi'nan
94. TIMBER GANG / Yu Guangyi
95. THE ORPHAN OF ANYANG / Wang Chao
96. SUNFLOWER / Zhang Yang
97. CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH / Lu Chuan
98. NEON GODDESSES / Yu Lik-wai
99. LITTLE MOTH / Peng Tao
100. THOUGH I AM GONE / Hu Jie

* not on database

1. A Brighter Summer Day
2. Platform
3. Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks
4. The Blue Kite
5. A City of Sadness
6. In the Heat of the Sun
7. A Borrowed Life
8. Oxhide
9. The Time to Live and the Time to Die
10. Peking Opera Blues

...plus 89 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.