Contemporary Cinema ← Walter's World

Twin Peaks: The Return [episode 5: Case Files] (2017)

Jun

9

2017

“Over the Waterfall: The Centrifugal Nature of Twin Peaks: The Return” The credit sequence of Twin Peaks: The Return begins with the familiar school portrait of Laura Palmer superimposed on the waterfall near the Great Northern Hotel. However, unlike the earlier seasons, when we see the flowing cascade from a distance, we now watch from ...

The Lost City of Z (2016)

May

12

2017

“An Image of Amazonia” In “An Image of Africa,” his scolding 1975 lecture to the Anglo-American literary establishment delivered at the University of Massachusetts, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe laments the modernist celebration of Joseph Conrad’s purportedly anti-imperialist novel, Heart of Darkness (1899). Achebe argues that, despite the indictment of the lunacy of White imperialism in ...

Elle (2016)

Apr

26

2017

“Autobiographies of Violence” For years, the films of Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven have been dogged in academic circles by their hyper-violence. In Hollywood films like Robocop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997), the Fascist nature of the violence within the plot is so graphically drawn that it begins to seem as if the special effects and ...

Paterson (2016)

Apr

14

2017

“A Step Up and Away for Jim Jarmusch” In my 2013 essay, “A Step Away from the Cinema: Hollywood and the Poetry of Frank O’Hara,” I attempt to theorize the relationship between the acute attention to everyday materiality in the poetry of the 1950s New York School and the normal visual operations of the cinema. ...

Twentieth Century Women (2016)

Mar

31

2017

“Jimmy Carter’s Warning” Twentieth Century Women is an ambitious character study that uses American history to explore the relationship between a Depression-era mother, Dorothea (Annette Bening) and her son, Jamie. Director Mike Mills’ film is set in 1979, but it uses the traditions of film, music, literature, and sociology to explore the nature of American ...

Manchester by the Sea (2016)

Mar

10

2017

“An Adagio for Cinema” One of the most moving pieces in the classical repertoire, Tomaso Albinoni’s “Adagio in G minor” lies at the center of an historical mystery. Albinoni biographer Remo Giazotto claimed to have found a fragment of a manuscript by the famous 18th century composer in Dresden soon after the end of World ...

Get Out (2017)

Mar

3

2017

“Racism, Get Out of My Head!” At Harvard University, Project Implicit is attempting to use social science testing to get people to confront the fact that their reactions to difference are not in their conscious control. For too long, the citizens of this country have ignored the obviousness of the privilege of certain identity positions ...

Hell or High Water (2016)

Feb

19

2017

“Calvary, but not Cavalry” The first of many startling images in director David Mackenzie’s neo-Western, Hell or High Water (2016) is of three crosses embedded in tile into an adobe building. We see the Christian icons in the background of the image, through the drive-through lanes as a teller opens her branch of the West ...

Gold (2016)

Jan

27

2017

“Way Out There in the Blue” At the ending “Requiem” of Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman (1949), Willy Loman’s neighbor, Charley delivers one of the most iconic statements on the American Dream in all of literature: “Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there ...

Why Him? (2016)

Jan

22

2017

“Amber Ways of Gain” In Anatomy of Criticism, literary critic Northrop Frye argues that the conflict between civilization and nature lies at the center of the Shakespearean comedy. Youngsters must enter what Frye calls the “green world” in order to work out their disconnects from adult society before returning to take over political power from ...