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Any mutuals or anyone interested in supporting my film criticism and academic work please follow my twitter to see some reviews from London Film Festival and other work.

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horror-aesthete

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell, 1995, dir. Shinichi Fukazawa

horror-aesthete

Ju-On: The Grudge (呪怨), 2002, dir. Takashi Shimizu

horror-aesthete

Suspiria, 2018, dir. Luca Guadagnino

horror-aesthete

Verónica, 2017, dir. Paco Plaza

horror-aesthete

The Whip and The Body (Le Corps et Le Fouet), 1963, dir. Mario Bava

horror-aesthete

Possession, 1981, dir. Andrzej Żuławski

napunk-history

Dead Kennedys

Kisasuoja, Saarijärvi, Finland (1981-10-16)

milksockets

fetish images: marquis competition 1995 - marquis magazine

goodbyedragoninn

“The reason I call the audience ghosts is because it reminds me of a short story I read a few years ago. It was said to be a true story that took place in Udon Thani province. Coincidentally, I just found out that it is about to be made into a film by Five Star Productions. As far as I can remember, the story went something like this: The main character was a man with a travelling cinema show, he made open-air presentations in villages and temples. One day a very mysterious man hired him to show a film in a temple that was a long way off. By the time he had arrived and set up the projector and film screen, it was after dusk. Gradually people started to arrive in the darkness. While the film was running, the audience all sat still in an orderly fashion, their eyes looking up at the screen. They did not show any emotion, nor did they speak to one another until the film ended. Then they all got up and wandered away. At dawn the next day the film-show owner realized that he was in the middle of a cemetery, and that he had been paid to show a film for ghosts.

“When I finished reading this story, I felt sad: even ghosts wanted to watch films, just like everyone else. They were ghosts that still wanted to dream; they paid their final offering of money to buy dreams, which was film. If you notice the people around you while watching a film, you will see that their behaviour is like that of ghosts, lifting up their heads to look at the moving images in front. The cinema itself is like a coffin with bodies, sitting still, as if under a spell. The moving images on the screen are camera records of events that have already taken place; they are remains of the past, strung together and called a film. In this hall of darkness, ghosts are watching ghosts.

“I felt the same way last month, when I had the opportunity to visit an arthouse cinema in Taipei called Spot Cinema. It is run by a well known film director, a god, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and is supported by the government which had donated the premises. The decoration inside was marvellous. There was a bookstore, a shop selling DVDs, a restaurant and a coffee shop called Café Lumière. In several corners there were stills from Hou’s films, proudly used as decoration. On the stairway ceiling was a large black and white photo of a man riding a motorcycle with a girl sitting behind him, a scene from one of his classic films. The person showing us around was a man well past middle-age; he pointed to the picture of the young man on the motorcycle and said that they had been in the same class at school. It affected me deeply as I heard this; it wouldn’t be long now before everyone here would become ghosts. The old man showing us around was wearing glasses and already showing grey hair, but his friend on the motorcycle would always remain the same age.”

— Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Ghosts in the Darkness

bongjoonhoe

Yi Yi (2000) dir. Edward Yang

jblareink

Heironymous Bosch The Hell Panel -Garden of Earthly Delights

treethymes

The Turin Horse (2011, dir. Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky)

Morning truly seems to plunge into night in the brevity of the sixth day, in which the light slowly reveals the table, with the father and daughter seated before their potatoes. “We have to eat,” says the father, but his fingers rest beside the plate while the daughter remains immobile and mute, her hair pulled back revealing a waxen face. And soon the faces, hardly emerged from the black, will dissolve back into it once again. But the end anticipated in their immobile bodies and vacant faces is not the final disaster. Rather, it is the time of judgment that these beings confront, motionless now, but whose relentless and patient gestures have ceaselessly sketched the image of a refusal to be abandoned to the sole fatality of wind and misery for the entire length of the film. The resigned bodies that are effaced in the night are also marked by the memory of the gestures with which they steadfastly applied themselves, each morning, to prepare for the morning to come. In the night that descends upon the final silence of the characters, the filmmaker’s rage remains intact against those who debase the lives of men and horses, those “victors” who, like the Nietzschean prophet of the second day says, have degraded all they have touched by making it into an object of possession, those who have made all change impossible because it has always already happened, and because they have appropriated everything including dreams and immortality.

A last film, says Béla Tarr. Let us not understand by this a film of the end of time, the description of a present beyond which there is no more future to hope for. Rather, the film back before which it is no longer possible to regress: the film that leads the schema from the interrupted repetition to its primary elements, and from every being’s fight against its own destiny to its ultimate end; and that, at the same time, makes of every other film just another film, another grafting of the same schema onto another story. To have made his last film is not necessarily to inaugurate the time in which it is no longer possible to film. The time after is rather the time in which one knows that with each new film the same question will be posed: why make another film about a story that is, in principle, always the same? We might suggest that it is because the exploration of the situations that this self-same story can determine is as boundless as the constancy with which individuals apply themselves to supporting it. The last morning is still a morning before, and the last film is still just another film. The closed circle is always open.

Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr, the Time After