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 […]

Between 9 and 11 p.m. on Friday, September 27, 1985, after Knight Rider and before the late local news, one of every five American TV sets was tuned to NBC to see the theatrical impresario who would send his casts into audiences to beg for change, was arrested for indecency after stripping alongside ticket buyers and had disrupted his own trial for tax evasion with spasms of poetry. Julian Beck, cofounder of The Living Theatre, appears in the feature-length season two premiere of Miami Vice as a Mephistophelean financier. Cultured and skeletal—Beck died of cancer before the episode aired—the trickster-god […]

While Adam Curtis has been making films since 1983, he first gained a kind of international recognition that once might have been termed “cult” with The Century of the Self (2002) and The Power of Nightmares (2004). These films source-coded the psychological and political terrains of the neoliberal landscape, deftly flaying away the already-decaying narratives of the Bush/Blair era. Deploying a voiceover pitched somewhere between Marxian don and MI-5 briefing, the twisting, layered narratives of Century and Nightmares articulated answers that were neither easy nor comforting, but answers all the same. Contemporary society was a managed “dreamworld,” and the stories […]