This is my gender.

Did not nearly catch me as much as the other Cronenberg flicks i've seen and i say this as an avid insect lover but it didn't acquire a strong pull into the story/world for me.

Minh-ha really is the GOAT.
In the beginning i thought i'd hate the MSPaint style editing with bouncy images and floating computer lettering but it has its own unique pull, it really dates the movie, but not in a negative (and possibly very much intended) way. The amalgamation of layered images, text, sound and movement generated such a calm, reflective rythm. Also as we all well know i'm a sucker for musings on memory and representation in film and Minh-ha really does this like no other.

Every single still frame radiates so much life and energy. The granular surface vibrating like microbes. Long dead objects, ruins of memorized lives filled to the brim with time and history, shaped by every single drop of rain water. In dust specks floating into a bright nimbus, filigree leaves breaking through a splintered roof one catches small glimpses of beauty.

Deeply somatically uncomfortable, experiential and politically important film which would have maybe worked out better in an art exhibition context than a cinematic one.

This more than anything conveys the texture of the Wuthering Heights, perpetual fall, veils of fog, cold wetness and burning flames. Feral and raw. Rough heather, coarse windswept cheeks, sharp thistles, licking wounds, running and running and running. Animals, wet eyes and woolly fur, insects, spiders, plants, rotten fruit, moss and bark growing in the interstices of the human stories so small against the vast landscape. Dirt and blood.

Painful time of empty eyes, filing away rasping time on skin, empty time in lonely corridors and halls, time played away in gambling hell. The TV-Set and elusive animals and insects are the true protagonists.

The coldness of the mise en scène perfectly sets the tone for this tense and subterranean feature. It is really the details that set you off, the nonchalance of even the most disturbing events. Haptic sound and lucid camerawork scratch the skin and seem to writhe just underneath the surface right to the ephemeral last shot.

The composition and camera work in this is just beyond incredible. It balances so well between geometrical, exact plan sequences which slowly reveal the spatial and social structures through framed shots and extremely close, haptic details which set an atmosphere that can be felt on skin surface level.

I just love Su Friedrich so much. I don't think I'd give any of her films less than 5 stars.

Out of all the shorts I saw in a Mendieta Retrospective at Gropius Bau this one touched me the most. Drifting through the darkened rooms I kept returning to it, sitting before it, watching it over and over again, crying as the white shroud dances up in flames transforming itself again and again in haunting beauty. Mendietas pieces possess a hypnotic yet deeply embodied affect which can't fully be described in words.

Every breath you take.