Tag Archives: The Family

Republic (380? BC, Plato)

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Brown

Everyone who knows Plato knows of Republic and knows of the allegory of the cave, I imagine, or at least my popular-informed conception of Republic considered the cave to be its central point or climax. As reading through the previous … Continue reading →

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Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928, D. H. Lawrence)

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Brown

At times it seems like reading and writing a novel like this which exalts the immediate bodily and sensory experience of life over the insular and intellectualized is committing a great hypocrisy. The hands that cradle the spine and turn … Continue reading →

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Manchild in the Promised Land (1965, Claude Brown)

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Brown

I haven’t read very much black literature or drug-culture literature or ghetto-life literature but I’ve never read anything that delves as deeply and as unpretentiously into such topics as this book, whose title and author I’d never heard of before … Continue reading →

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The Slow and the Mild-Mannered: Milano Drift

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Brown

14 Nov 2013: Il Posto (DVD, 1961, Ermanno Olmi) The dreamlike mundanity on offer here harks forward to another Italian, Marco Ferreri, but with more of a focus on cinematography and even more of a locational drift. The camera itself … Continue reading →

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Intention Unknown

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Brown

5 Nov 2013: Code Unknown (DVD, 2000, Michael Haneke) Either intriguingly mysterious or banally unmysterious, this film probably depends more than most on where you are to fill in its gaps (visualized via black-cushioned cuts between the disparate events of … Continue reading →

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Extinctional Family

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Brown

31 Oct 2013: Fists in the Pocket (DVD, 1965, Marco Bellocchio) Since one bathtub murder in a week wasn’t enough (the first one was faked, anyway), here’s a somewhat different story involving a similar device. While it has an unusual … Continue reading →

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Working for the Man

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Brown

29 Oct 2013: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (DVD, 1960, Mikio Naruse) However recycled many of its conventions feel – the hardboiled (albeit female) narration, the tough-but-playful wise-girl repartee, the undifferentiated earnestness of many of the performances, the smoky … Continue reading →

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Haunting, Taunting, Daunting

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Brown

20 Oct 2013: Empire of Passion (DVD, 1976, Nagisa Oshima) Though entirely different in its subject matter from the other films of Oshima I’ve seen, it too possesses the same sort of mystical eerieness that pervades the others. It’s not … Continue reading →

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A Fierce Miss American Pie-Maker

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Brown

16 Oct 2013: Mildred Pierce (DVD, 2011, Todd Haynes) Though at first I was impressed with the visual tributes to melodrama-master Rainer Werner Fassbinder (there’s a PFA retrospective of his at the moment), the frosted glass, the dollies behind prominent … Continue reading →

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Disaster Chef

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Brown

10 Oct 2013: Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death (DVD, 2005, Nicolas Winding Refn) By far the dullest of the trilogy, probably by design, but like the second, its slight distinctions from the norm don’t elevate it any further … Continue reading →

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