rustbelt lassitude

[keyframedaily]

Hideko Takamine in London, 1963.

[rustbeltlassitude]

the best ever

[rustbeltlassitude]

Meghe Dhaka Tara / The Cloud-Capped Star (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960)

[rustbeltlassitude]

Meghe Dhaka Tara / The Cloud-Capped Star (1960)

I wrote about Ritik Ghatak's The Cloud-Capped Star, which I love a lot. There's a lot about how I love it, but also a little bit about western film criticism and how it gets India (as well as Japan) wrong, ignores the politics of those countries' filmmakers for an easy narrative about "spirituality." 

As I said on twitter, I think filmmaking in 1950/60s India and Japan cared way more about women then 1960/70s Europe did, yet the latter gets credit for being the radical and political era. 

[rustbeltlassitude]

[dhrupad]

[mapsontheweb]

How far away is Ohio?

[rustbeltlassitude]

ohio

[nuafam215]

“Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point of cultural studies?…At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we’ve been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don’t feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.”

Stuart Hall (via nuafam215)

[wednesdaydreams-deactivated2022]

Even if the work is hard, I have no choice. 

Gion Bayashi/A Geisha (1953), Kenji Mizoguchi

[afternoonbreezes]

Hideko Takamine in A Wanderer’s Notebook // Her Lonely Lane (Mikio Naruse, 1962)

[spontaneoustonguecalcification]

…the task of a critical theory is to produce as accurate a knowledge of complex social processes as the complexity of their functioning requires. It is not its task to console the left by producing simple but satisfying myths, distinguished only by their super-left-wing credentials.

- Stuart Hall 'The Whites of Their Eyes' (via thisidlethought)

[cuttyspot]

[Popular culture is] a profoundly mythic … theater of popular desires, a theater of popular fantasies …where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to our audiences … but to ourselves.

Stuart Hall (via cuttyspot)

[rustbeltlassitude]

A selection from a poem by Abbas Kiarostami included in the 2002 collection Walking with the Wind. It also perfectly describes the weather in the midbest lately. 

[rustbeltlassitude]

L'arbre, le maire et la médiathèque / The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque (1993)

I hesitate to put even the most woeful of directors in tiny compartments, let alone do the same for directors I love. Yet, if I had to do this for Eric Rohmer, I would obviously say he's a filmmake...

I wrote a lot about Rohmer again! This review is a little less personal than the one I posted yesterday so if that turned you off then you can read this! 

[rustbeltlassitude]

Kicking and Screaming (1995)

I guess some context is in order here. I just graduated from college a little over a month and I haven't made any progress with what you might categorize as the rest of my life. I include this intr...

hey, I wrote about Kicking and Screaming and a little bit on my own life right now. please read. :+) 

[journalofanobody]

“The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn’t lessen but augments this love of life.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini (via journalofanobody)

[rustbeltlassitude]

Here's eight shots I really, really like from Angela Schanelec's Marseille (2004) 

"All of my films are based on the thought, that the better part of life is inscrutable, full of misunderstandings and ruled by chance. The characters live in contradiction between this extradition and the more or less constant try to rebel against it. Also Marseille is about this conflict which is insolvable in the end." - Angela Schanelec 

[rustbeltlassitude]

Reminder: the opening of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Millennium Mambo is still the best. It's like the saddest, most beautiful and perfect thing I've ever seen and I honestly wish it would never end.