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I'm quite taken by the concept of being a Third Worlder for time.

Seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City

Some of the most majestic dust, rain and snow you’ll find in any film.

Seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 35mm

Naruse manages to turn his widescreen frame into something cramped and suffocating, emphasizing just how narrow those stairs really are, a ageway with no real exit. Every occupied portion of the frame is just another reminder of how trapped Keiko truly is. The alternative, marrying one of the several men who ire her, always burns up in the glow of daylight. She exists in an entrenched division of labor among Japanese women, where she can face the wife of one of her clients because they mutually understand that they simply take care of the same man in different ways, maintain him as the petite bourgeois cog he needs to be.

The voiceover, which used to indicate the existence of a subjective agency in Wife! Be Like a Rose! and Wife, takes on a more tragic character. In between all the somber reflections and descriptions of procedure are the self-preserving lies that Keiko tells herself. She wears a smile again, returning to this abhorrent normal.

Seen at the Metrograph in New York City in 35mm

Opens with a shot of LT's two sons fighting with each other as he drives them to school and closes with an almost identical shot of LT sending two rapists off to a different city. There's a perverse mirroring here, gestures of pained selflessness and forgiveness, moving from the private to the public. Two similar images occur in between, one of two dead women and another of two girls who must humiliatingly offer themselves sexually to LT. The reverberations of this specific visual configuration thus string together in a loop, like what Zoe says about humans having to feed on themselves, an ouroboros that points to some kind of infinity. In proper Ferrara fashion, this manifests as a public death. LT has dissolved into the crowd, his brain splattered across the universe.

Seen on my computer

Skeleton with eyeballs was funny I guess.

Seen on YouTube

Writing the screenplay was difficult, and its complexity reveals Ozu's great art. Like a haiku writer, he draws lines that are not guiding principles. They are to be seen rather than followed.

The narrative is not guided by a succession of clues. There is no suspense. Only the unexpected course of events, interrupted without anticipation, the story left unresolved.

- Jean-Claude Rousseau

What The End of Summer does resolve with are not people but crows perched on gravestones. The patriarch has fallen and taken the entire social order with him, leaving everyone stranded with a modernized Japan that had announced itself so loudly in those opening shots. This sense of teleological confusion is reflected in the film's overall structure, which sets up two marriages that never happen and fall completely to the wayside of this story about an infantilized old man who only wants to play. He almost dies once, then he actually dies the next time around. Is this really it?

Ozu's diagonal perspective lines lead nowhere and center no one. It's like what Hasumi says about the lack of staircases shown onscreen. These women seem to float up and down floors, forming the ebb and flow of presence and absence that is so characteristic of Ozu's spaces, which initially take on a comedic effect before collapsing into something totally tragic. A family unmoored, a film unmoored. There is a genuine freedom to be found, no doubt, but not without any costs to tally.

Seen on the Criterion Channel

A film that seems to always exist at some indeterminate halfway point, shifting around as much as its camera does, saturated with unreadable faces and incandescent colors, moments of spontaneous romance given immediate awareness through musical cues and background posters, somewhat distancing but not enough to deny the integrity of what we're seeing.

When we're first introduced to Dr. Nancy Love, or Ann or whatever her name actually is, the camera stays behind the glass barrier, rendering visible the mediation of her telephone. Yet later, in a moment of bare surreality, she stands right in the room with Eve as they speak over the phone. The sound mixing should've always been a clue, an indication that these barriers are more porous than they might appear, that means of concealment and deception can eventually work their way to the earnestly romantic. So of course Eve and Mickey finally it their love at gunpoint, except the guns weren't even loaded to begin with. Does it really matter if it got the goods? Eve's face gives a million answers in the final shot. This whole business of love is still in negotiation.

Seen on my computer

Equal parts torturous and liberating. The whiplash editing of the film's opening moments tells us everything we need to know. Cassavetes fragments continuity and spatial coherence as a means of creating ontological uncertainty, collapsing all meaningful distinctions between performance, spectatorship and so-called real life. The way he toggles so aggressively between massive wides and extreme close-ups and the way he smash cuts to new scenes made me feel like I was being dragged around by my hair.

Like many of the best films about theater, there is an urgent sense of the present moment and the potential it contains for something truly novel. As much as the characters debate aging, as much as Nancy's death continues to torment Myrtle, the film continues to situate itself in the perpetual present, the specific arduousness of having to go through another rehearsal and another performance for the first time. Even ghosts must be tactile. It's a painful process, racked with confusion, but it ultimately bears fruit of some kind, a sweetness not yet tasted.

Seen on the Criterion Channel

The muscularity of Walsh's filmmaking comes not from his ability to demonstrate force or from the valorization of masculinized power. Instead, it stems from a clarity of cinematic space and an attentiveness towards how his actors navigate said space.

Look at how he films Leslie Caron performing ballet. The camera pulls back to create a wider frame, quite literally giving her the stage. Walsh never feels the need to intrude much beyond this, excepting two close-ups, one to show her expression and another to show the virtuosity of her legs. Otherwise, he only makes simple traces around the room in tandem with where she decides to go, permitting the full articulation of her movements. It's one of the most graceful and beautiful sequences in his filmography.

Walsh is, in fact, the total opposite of being forceful and domineering. In a way, it's the exact lesson that Socks and Judge must learn, two men who spent their entire lives proving themselves through violence, men who also developed neurotic obsessions with stamping out any imperfections. But the scars remain. As Angela says, it's braver to bare them than to deny them. After all, what is a performance if not an intense form of openness, both to those who sing and dance with you and to those who watch? Life suffocates when it's closed off.

Seen on my computer

Walsh sure knows how to move his camera. There's an incredible flow to this film, how the men argue with each other and conduct themselves during combat. Those aerial sequences are truly something to behold.

Seen on my computer

Brakhage sure loved his animals.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

According to Stan Brakhage, the only thing that truly matters in so-called Western history is basketball.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

That is indeed a door.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Genuinely didn't know what I was even looking at.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Interesting to think about how Brakhage connects to stop motion.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Such stunning, dramatic clouds. I gasped multiple times.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Love it when there are dancing particles in a Brakhage film. The slow motion shot of the wind blowing through the yellow leaves is so sublime.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Very bizarre to see and hear synchronized dialogue in a Brakhage film. Wonderfully self-reflexive.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Brakhage’s deconstruction of space applies not only to places but also individual organisms.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Imagine having your first moments of life turned into a cinematic abstraction.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Brakhage values the corporeality of death as much as he does the corporeality of birth.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Unbelievable warmth.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

The cinema of the hypnagogic consciousness, of the image, inaccessible to analysis, devours in its constant renewal both memory and expectation, projecting that “continuous present” which Brakhage had sensed as Gertrude Stein’s great and particular lesson for him. The agents of its sustained instantaneity are camera movement, light, and the editing process itself. In Anticipation, then, Brakhage’s shadow hovers over light emerging through door and window, the brilliance of car lights streaks through the black night, a garden is seen as light reflected from its green, a rainbow forms in the water of a garden hose. In the dark of night, the complex play of lights animating an amusement park move, spinning, circling, whirling, in a space of infinite depth and total ambiguity. The camera moves with and against light. An image is reversed, and that movement of reversal flattens, transforms the space of the garden in the image. Pans, shot away from the light, from within the park’s ride, send light careening across the screen and into the obscurity of its surface. The camera gains from that obscurity the ability to reverse the reality of its own movement into the illusion of the object’s motion, so that a moon and a temple like structure are seen in pans to streak across the screen.

In this film we see as well Brakhage’s editing style reach maturity. Its fluidity almost belies its total sovereignty. The cuts are many and quick (Brakhage in his mature work also makes great use of the fade), but—and this is Brakhage’s point of dialectical intensity—they are fused by a camera movement sustained over cuts. Disparate images (car lights and a boy in a garden, for example) are united by movement or direction either repeated or sustained through the cut. Disparate spaces are unified in a consistent flattening or obscuring of spatial coordinates and that unity is intensified by the synthetic effect of continuous movement produced in editing.

- Annette Michelson

Anything I can say right now feels wholly inadequate.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Sonbert looking fresh.

Seen at the Metrograph in New York City

A scary amount of Reagan appearances.

Seen at the Metrograph in New York City

A sense of the global, but in a human sense rather than a capitalist one. Some parts reminded me of Dorsky and Hiler.

Seen at the Metrograph in New York City

I’ve spent the past week thinking about Rousseau’s incorporation of film leaders, so I was delightfully surprised to see Sonbert doing something similar here.

Seen at the Metrograph in New York City

Before we had the two Russian transwomen shooting heroin and making out we had this. So moving. I love the shots of abstracted, blinding light.

Seen at the Metrograph in New York City

Sonbert’s use of music is so euphoric. The old man sitting next to me was dancing in his seat.

Seen at the Metrograph in New York City

A film bookended by tracking shots of a father and his daughter-in-law walking together. At first they're returning home, following the rhythms of daily life to reconstitute an ostensibly united family. By the end, these same two people will be heading in the opposite direction, a vista that we never really see, whose expanse and promise remains ambiguous to us. The patriarch's oft-stated desire to preserve tranquility has completely failed to weather the tides of history.

These are the sequences that really demonstrate Naruse's command over cinematic space, blocking and decoupage. Most telling to me are the ways his characters grant or deny each other a shared look, either out of cruelty or agony. In that final scene, he inserts two POV shots, which are nowhere else to be found in the film, perhaps signifying Kikuko's newfound subjectivity, the possibility that she is being set free to something better.

But Setsuko Hara's performance denies us this certainty. The way her face shatters and the way her smile conceals pain, not unlike the Noh mask that fascinates Shingo so much, undermines and complicates any single emotional expression. The man who loved her most had trapped her all this time. What she can make of this falls out of the film's hands and into ours.

Seen at the Metrograph in New York City in 35mm

They showed this one again because they messed up the sound the first time. I’m not complaining because I love it so much.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

No one does textures like Brakhage.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

When the entire screen turned blinding white and the light finally burst through my jaw fucking dropped.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

As far as baby movies are concerned it’s kind of hard to beat Window Water Baby Moving.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Just like rubbing my eyes.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Photo negative is its own realm.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

The most dimly lit of the Naruse films I’ve seen so far. It’s perfect for a film so suffocating and listless. Like some of his post-war films, there’s a distinct lack of propulsion to the narrative. And of course, he punctuates Kiichi’s tears with a sudden dissolve to the raindrops outside.

Seen at the Metrograph in New York City in 35mm

Unfortunately, this is pure catnip to me. Pretty mediocre when it's not about a beautiful woman killing people in creative ways but thankfully Chad Stahelski clearly reshot a lot of this so it is mostly just a beautiful woman killing people in creative ways. Better than the new Mission: Impossible film!

Seen at AMC Lincoln Square 13 in New York City

My first time seeing this since I was in high school. Along with a few other Brakhage shorts, it was my introduction to what can broadly be called experimental cinema. So much of what I understand to be “radical” form, of what film can do with space and time, emerged from here. This time around, with the added context of his earliest shorts, I am especially moved by his attentiveness towards the human body. Through all the textures and colors and cosmic imagery, it remains his primary concern.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Simply the most beautiful and miraculous thing I have ever seen. The cross-cutting between them kissing and him placing his hand on her submerged belly will always make me cry.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Love to be surrounded by cat noises.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

You can really feel the rush of the weather and the intimacy of skin touching.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Such intense and sensuous close-ups.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Wonder Ring, a film of the Third Avenue El shot in 1955 for Joseph Cornell, must have served a crucially educative purpose. For the movement of the train itself, the framing of its windows, the reflective surfaces of both windows and doors, the distortions produced by un evenness in those surfaces, all propose a composite inventory of the resources in the camera itself. Dispersed throughout the structure and the trajectory of the elevated railway, they are reassembled, as it were, and the sequence of formal strategies available is discovered as the course of a journey.

- Annette Michelson

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Still feels very strange to watch a Brakhage film with actors.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

These early Brakhage films are so psychosexual.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Dude is so down bad for this girl that she has to pull a prank suicide in order for him to become a great artist again. Sure, I guess? In any case, some of the images are truly striking.

Seen at Japan Society in New York City with live accompaniment by Shun Ishiwaka

How the fuck do you even talk about this without descending into some inane bullshit about the creation of the universe? The way Baillie melds and overlaps images is completely singular, his use of sound and music extremely moving. Contains one of the greatest sex scenes in all of cinema.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Such an evocative use of close-ups.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

Seeing this on a print rather than on my laptop really did change everything. I felt the warmth of every color, the breeze of every movement. Each element is perfect, nothing is superfluous. That incredible tilt breaks us out of the loop of a panning shot, a simple gesture towards freedom and transcendence.

Seen at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in 16mm

But syntax and rhetoric, in film, are an artificial veneer thrown over the living, which escapes them, or which they paralyze, freeze, and kill: no Paulhan is conceivable here, where Terror alone is the law.

- Jacques Rivette

The image is a tomb for the eye. To see a film is to come before something that is already-seen [déjà-vu]. Something already seen by others: the camera, the auteur, the technicians, the first audience, the people in charge, sometimes even political figures, tyrants. And what is already seen [déjà-vu] is already enjoyed [déjà-joui].

- Serge Daney

Look at this mountain, once it was fire.

- Paul Cézanne

• Man with a Movie Camera
• Limite
• Sylvia Scarlett
• At Land
• Cluny Brown
• The Man I Love
• Outrage
• Awaara
• Angel Face
• Johnny Guitar

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Carol
2. Song to Song
3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
4. A Ghost Story
5. The Social Network
6. Side Effects
7. La Cocina
8. Kubo and the Two Strings
9. Her
10. Una

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of films that influenced my most recent short film A Haunting of Past Ink (2023), some much more obvious than others. To anyone who knows me well, most of these choices are unsurprising. I very much view this short film as an articulation of where I am now artistically, which of course encomes everything I've accumulated and learned from over the past several years.

I would also include a list of books and albums I read/listened to while making this film, but quite frankly I don't really any of them.

• First Reformed
• The Card Counter
• Memoria
• Syndromes and a Century
• Fireworks
• Tokyo Twilight
• An Autumn Afternoon
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire
• Mirror
• Werckmeister Harmonies

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.