I was in Truro yesterday morning and I saw a painting. It is in the Chapel of Christ the Worker in Truro Cathedral. It really caught my attention because it was so well set in that realist art of the thirties. I love the way it remarks the Soviet realism of the period and found …
Monthly archives: January 2012
institutes
There is a great wealth of institutes in Cornwall. The countryside is densely populated compared to many areas of rural Britain, there were so many small mining communities that there are Insitutes dotted all over the place. These two are nearby. I know nothing about them as yet, I’ve seen them for years. The first …
persona (bergman, 1966)
What is it to want to watch any film? If film teaches us how to desire and fictions structure our reality what am I doing watching this slow half conversation between two women who are one?
preparing a new paddock
There is land across the road that has been contested for many years, it is poisoned from earlier periods of mining and the dumping of various wastes and is heavily contaminated in places with arsenic amongst other things. It has also become home to a vast and expanding colony of Japanese knotweed. It was owned …
300
Well what am I to make of the 300? Second time I’ve seen it and a very different watching in some ways and not in others. This time too I hear the entirely fictional and impossible speeches made by Spartans about saving ‘little Greece’, that home of ‘reason and justice’, setting out to defeat the …
The Hoe, the Barbican and Ale
It is funny what you learn, or maybe remember. On a train travelling to the south west longing for privacy I am interrupted by three revelers returning from a drinking birthday celebration at the Tom Cobley, a pub outside Exeter. One of the best pubs in the world I am told and we talk about …
Trainspotters@Chesterfield
A small group of trainspotters, an indigenous species, note the highly specialised camouflage. Gatherings of this size are becoming increasingly rare. Some specialists suggest that their decline may be due to global boredom. Posted from WordPress for Android
Dogville
Dogville (Lars Von Trier) allows interpretation from many perspectives. As SP said, it is like a Shakespeare play in that respect amongst others. I focus below on a set of ideas, perhaps more words, I encountered in Lacanian writing about the film. Zizek refers to Dogville in A perverts guide to Cinema, and elsewhere other …
me after my daughter has done with me
So far so good. We all watched some of Dogville this evening. We didn’t get all the way through. That was ok, because I was fearful of how the women present would react to the lead up to the denoumemt, the climax. Posted from WordPress for Android
Afghanistan, Allegory, the Kite Runner and Knowledge
I watched the Kite Runner, the film directed by Marc Forster (2007). I’ve not read the book but from the comments of various people who had read it I was expecting something very different, something more. I experienced the film as profoundly allegorical, relating a story of America’s involvement in Afghanistan prior to the current …
Continue reading “Afghanistan, Allegory, the Kite Runner and Knowledge”