In La panthère des neiges/The Velvet Queen, a feature directed by Marie Amiguet based on an idea by renowned wildlife photographer Vincent Munier, French writer and traveler Sylvain Tesson accompanies Munier to the Sanjiangyuan nature reserve on the Tibetan plateau, hoping for a glimpse of the elusive snow leopard. “Not everything is made for the human eye,” Tesson says at one point, a sentiment that is both a lesson in filmic observation—searching for the unseen in order to record it—as well as a commentary on the responsibilities inherent in that act. In the beginning of his expedition with Munier, Tesson […]

Twenty years after the release of All About Lily Chou-Chou, I can’t think of a film that better depicts what first drew people to the internet, and certainly none that matches its expressive use of content-type header errors. Director Shunji Iwai evokes the gaps and hesitancy in early internet communication through the depiction of character encoding across the screen. Posts on an online forum devoted to Lily Chou-Chou, a mysterious pop singer, first appear in a mojibake jumble of accented Latin characters. We can hear the clack of an old keyboard and another tap to refresh. The BBS code is […]

For the past six years, I sought out amateur travel films made by women in the first half of the 20th century, which I collected in an all-archival essay film, Terra Femme. In the process, I watched dozens of hours of footage of everything under the sun: biblical gardens, women doing laundry, ice fields, a tapir, mounds in a cemetery. Occasionally, there is a handwritten intertitle. “Crossing the Equator” reads one, and the filmmaker has added little serif marks to the letters in “Equator.” What follows is footage shot onboard a boat during a line-crossing ceremony, in which Poseidon and […]

The year after I graduated college, I’d go to Andrei Tarkovsky double bills a lot. In the New York of the mid-1980s, there would be a Tarkovsky retrospective every few months at Film Forum and now-shuttered spots like the Thalia and Metro Twin. The Russian director’s 1975 Mirror would always be the second film on the program—Andrei Rublev and Mirror, Stalker and Mirror, Solaris and Mirror—so, I wound up seeing Mirror many times. This was partly due to fatigue. My day job was writing grants for a nonprofit. I’d see these movies after work and would invariably drift off during […]

American film studies and production programs are undergoing a major structural overhaul. A long-burgeoning movement comprised of academics and filmmakers are calling for the full decolonization of syllabi and cinematic offerings within these courses, which have historically foregrounded work by straight, white men as the pinnacle of what’s worth studying and emulating. Many academics and scholars hesitate to use the term “decolonize” broadly for fear of rendering it into a tepid buzzword (or worse, deflating the term to a borderline-meaningless liberal t-shirt slogan), yet it’s become an essential framework for many who wish to make meaningful changes within the confines […]

Is there any document more compelling than a good syllabus? I have a collection of favorites in a folder on my desktop and often daydream about following a particular professor’s list of screenings, readings and writing prompts to create my own individual class, a kind of private self-improvement gambit or—even better—a venture into some fantastic cinematic territory still unknown to me. A good syllabus is a treasured resource; a great syllabus, though, with its hints and errant connections, exudes the magic of possibility and epiphany. As an example, I remember reading my colleague Priya Jaikumar’s syllabus for a graduate seminar […]