Precious Bodily Fluids

Tag: Contempt

  • Viewing Log: August 2013, Vol. I

    Pépé le Moko (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1937) – A masterpiece of setting and staging. It’s in Algiers, within the Casbah, and it treats its environs and those native to it as simply mise-en-scene, but this is to be expected from 1930s poetic realism. Everything about this is “classic,” exactly what defines the “golden age” of…

  • Forms of Being – Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, 2004

    The book is divided into three close and thorough analyses of the films Contempt (Godard, 1963), All About My Mother (Almodóvar, 1999), and The Thin Red Line (Malick, 1998). In each, the authors examine the overlapping categories of subjectivity, being, and identity. In Contempt, they argue that being is deferred, or perhaps deconstructed, by the nature of the contempt that grows between…

  • Viewing Log, Week of 7/29/2012

    Rope (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) – It’s usually just chalked up as a “great experiment,” by virtue of the precious few cuts in the film, and the disguising of most of them, along with it being shot more-or-less in real time and all in one enclosed space. But it really stands out as one of…