Of what use is a film or video, a work that gives us more of the images that we have seen—of cruelty—on the television news; of more of the questions that poets and professors have tried to speak to many of us for decades; of more of the history we have known, forgotten, known, and forgotten again? Privatemakes it possible for us to believe we are seeing individuals, that we are being given true emotions and thoughts.
A review of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
But however present the moral question is in this story, it is never directly raised, and Ishiguro resists the urge to make it obvious. If these people are artistic and capable of love, is their tragedy any greater? If they…
A review of Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
What is extraordinary about these stories is the intense fragility of the voice, which has an almost otherworldly texture sometimes. Or rather, no: not otherworldly. Instead, it is a voice that seems able to encompass both the next world and…
A Master of Music, Math, and Chess: Anthony Braxton’s Duets and Three Compositions of New Jazz
I haven’t listened to jazz in the last several years as much as I used to, as I have been impatient to hear direct and explicit thoughts, though there’s an expansive feel to jazz that I miss: and Anthony Braxton, devoted to music, mathematics, and chess, is a legendary and legendarily complex figure, and he has been the subject of various critical studies, including Forces in Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton by Graham Lock (Da Capo, 1988) and The Music of Anthony Braxton by Mike Heffley (Greenwood Publishing, 1996).
Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers: Poverty and Possibility, Heroism and Decadence in Italy
How one family supports and exploits its members is shown—their connection to each other is strained, it breaks: the family is revealed as a primitive tribe, a complex but primitive tribe, part of a society that replicates (and inspires) the family’s impulses. Visconti, an aristocrat, treats these peasants and workers with a respect that is hard to imagine their equals in American film, especially those who are African-American or Latino, receiving even at this time: Rocco and his brothers are allowed moments of transcendence.
New Stereotypes: Carroll & Graf’s Freedom in this Village
The book assumes that race and homosexuality (blackness and gayness) are real categories, and draws part of its authority from the social and historical importance these subjects have been given by many people through the years, but the idea of race is as suspect as the idea of strict sexual orientations. Skin is not a significant emblem of existential being (despite hundreds of years of western racialism, and the 1930s Negritude movement in Africa, France, Haiti, and Martinique, and the 1960s/70s black arts movement in the United States).
World War II’s mass murder still casts shadow: Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog and other films
With luck, criticism becomes celebration. I cannot celebrate the history described by Alain Resnais’s film Night and Fog, a film of dignified honesty, forceful discipline, and a passion so resolute and true it does not have to remark on itself, a great film, but I can celebrate the gift of art and intelligence that it is.
A review of Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos
Despite its length, this is an engrossing book. It may not rival those great achievements in biography that one can read for their own sake, but everyone with an interest in Perec will find it essential. Although David Bellos rather…
A review of King of Cats by Blake Fraina
The book’s merit is in the presentation of a recognizable character, a popular cultural type—a seductive, reclusive, possibly bisexual musician—and the explanation for his character and contradictions and how these things relate to—are made possible by, and influence—the surrounding world.…
A review of Accused directed by Jacob Thuesen
The film’s early photography is clear, full of blues and greens, and is attractive without being glamorous. Henrik’s eyes are blue and, primarily, he seems to wear blue, gray, and black clothes. Henrik and Nina, with her shoulder-length light brown hair and trim figure, look like ordinary people—in early middle age, and they are attractive but not distractingly so.