There’s a moment in Sky Hopinka’s 2017 short film, Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary, where for just a few frames, a layer of video floats on top of the subtitles. Blink and you’ll miss it, but in those frames something deeper winks back at you. Subtitles often float like oil on top of water; they are in the image but not of the image. But in Sky’s films, language is not a metatext. It’s organic, dynamic, always in the process of becoming something else. Language shapes and is shaped, carries and is carried, by the specificity of the […]

In one of those freak festival viewing coincidences that don’t really mean anything, Sunday started with two movies in a row opening with the sound of a reiki bowl. The higher profile one, Shirley, marks multiple firsts for Josephine Decker: first directed from someone else’s screenplay (by Sarah Gubbins, adapted from Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel), first period piece and—most crucially to my mind—first without DP Ashley Connor. The subject is Shirley Jackson; I’ve read two of her short stories (I’m not proud of that) and would be curious to hear how this plays for knowledgeable admirers. Adaptation or no, visually this is […]