Authors — Chris Cassingham
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Bleak Week, C’est Chic
The inaugural season of the American Cinematheque series Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair took place in 2022, a cheeky stab at some summertime counter-programming. Its diverse lineup was aimed, as per the Cinematheque’s website, at spotlighting “filmmakers who wholly embrace a cinema of despair in pursuit of unpleasant truths and raw empathy.” Indeed, in the festival’s first 33 film–strong slate of repertory classics like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Come and See (1985), Winter Light (1963), Funny Games (1997), Breaking the Waves (1996), and Sátántangó (1994), this visceral quality was front and center as an organizing principle, even if the films weren’t united by much besides their baseline dreariness and […]
by Chris Cassingham on May 29, 2026 -
“What Does a Thing Provide You With?”: Amanda Kramer on the Props and Interiors in By Design
“I have never seen the problem with fetishizing objects and fetishizing people as though they were objects,” director Amanda Kramer tells me in a conversation ahead of the release of her latest film, By Design. “It doesn’t mean we don’t also see the person for their soul…They elicit romance. They elicit seduction. There’s something drawing you in, compelling, alluring, and the object itself is not necessarily lesser-than because it’s looked at in this way.” Kramer’s provocative theory is instructive. Her latest film, By Design, about a lonely woman named Camille (Juliette Lewis) who swaps bodies with a beautiful chair and […]
by Chris Cassingham on Feb 18, 2026
