Jean Luc-Godard once said, “Cinema begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami,” and to this it must now be added that cinema was resurrected by Bi Gan.

Resurrection might be the first film, the last film, or perhaps all of them together. It is an unlit candle flickering in the dark. A paean for the wonder of chaos, for the necessity of tumult, and a set of instructions with which once can turn the fractures of history into…

Now presenting, Man With a Movie Camera…
🏆 Winner of Samcrom’s 1,000th Review Contest 🏆

There exists a mechanical instrument that allows one to peel away strips of time and control them. This instrument, understood simply, is a tool of transcription or recording. It captures light-rays. Understood on a slightly more involved level, it becomes apparent that the tool does not simply capture light, but time. To be precise: it transmutes time into a material strip of frames, which can then be…

The point of the Narcissus myth is not that he fell in love with himself, Marshall Mcluhan argues, but, more precisely, “the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any ma­terial other than themselves.” The river threw back an image of himself, and it was this— “his own extended or repeated image”— which so captured Narcissus. And so, fast-forwarding some three-thousand years, we find the modern myth of Kane Parson’s backrooms, which work in…

An admirable swing, but I just don’t think Lowery has what it takes to pull off a Bergman-esque tête-à-tête with two characters psychologically scraping at each other until an emotional catharsis leaves them both hollowed out. The overworked dialogue is laborious instead of writerly, and the compositions are too lax for such a sparse mise-en-scène (sans sartorial elements). After spending two hours stuck in a confined space with these two characters, I wish I came away with a better grasp…

The ultimate capitalistic fantasy: taste the pure possibility of the multiverse and then return to dutifully do your taxes. That is only one of the ways this film espouses the pernicious ideology of capitalism; such values are embedded in the very fabric of its conceptually inconsistent multiverse. The maximalist excess, the superficial thought, the rush of spectacle, the triumph of the individual— these are the implicit and explicit outcomes of the capitalist system, and also the driving forces of the…

A white square. Blank, soundless 16 mm film, running through the projector on loop. Equal parts calming, boring, entrancing, this short film (can it even be called a film?) ultimately reveals to us that the closer one looks into nothing, the more they will eventually see.  

Like Malevich’s Black Square, Zen for Film is a move into the utmost basics of its medium. It is non-objective (non-representational) art; that is, it has no correlation with the natural world. Kazimir…