Synchronicity is a weird experience to behold. The morning I recorded this video, I was scrolling through YouTube in search of a solution to a technical problem. Suddenly, in the right column of my screen, a video popped up. Its title—“NO FRIENDS? FILM YOURSELF!”—intrigued me. I clicked on the video (it already had one million views so, why not give it one more? Though this, I’ll admit, is not my usual line of reasoning).
Self-portraits: Through A Glass, Darkly
A collection of twelve self-portraits that share one element: glass or crystal surfaces. Little mirrors, big mirrors, bathroom mirrors soaked in steam; dirty or sprayed windows; bottles and lamps.... Though some of these images look like composites, there are no digital overlays here: just the magic of natural reflections and textures.
The Blind Spot in Brian De Palma’s Cinema: An illustrated Guide
The blind spot is a fascinating concept when applied to cinema—art of the visible that relies on the capacity of the eye to see. Brian De Palma, whose films are deeply obsessed with vision, happens to be a master of the blind spot. Here are some examples—only a few in a vast catalogue of inventions—that give us some insight into how the filmmaker has toyed with the idea...
The Moves #3: ‘The Reckless Moment’ (Max Ophüls, 1949)
In Max Ophüls’ 'The Reckless Moment', time marks the compass of a thriller, while space gives architecture to a melodrama. But time and space, thriller and melodrama, do not advance independently, or in parallel: rather, it is the perfect imbrication of both these dimensions and genres that constitutes the film’s nucleus. In this text, I analyse in depth one sequence happening 30 minutes into the film.
Notes On Film Criticism (VI): None So Blind
At 18, I was seeing a man who was a writer. He was older than me and had managed to build a simple, bohemian life doing his thing. I was a high-school dropout working as a waitress, always orbiting toward artistic people, perhaps because I didn’t have a clue about how to build that kind of life for myself. One day, we embarked on a conversation about one film he had watched at the cinema. I have forgotten the title of the film in question, but not the question raised by his response to the film...
‘Emerging’
I wanted to become a mysterious, alluring presence—like those femmes fatales in film noirs who appear from and disappear into black. I wanted to emerge from darkness, to be material and immaterial, to flicker and slide, to flutter like a spirit but land like a real woman. To remember the cosmic highs of when I went dancing in my youth… So, I closed the door of my room, turned the camera on, and played.
Remixing 1928
A presentation of three audiovisual remixes that use footage from 1928 films. And a few comments on the experience of working on these pieces, applying to contests, and how to approach works made almost one hundred years ago.
The Actor’s Body—A Constellation of French Cinema: ‘Le Doulos’ / ‘À bout de souffle’ / ‘Mauvais sang’
Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard and Leos Carax belong to the same lineage of filmmakers and the same family of French cinema. This audiovisual essay remixes three scenes from their films to study their connections and the work of their actors: Serge Reggiani, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Denis Lavant.
Bridges: ‘La bocca del lupo’ (Pietro Marcello, 2009)
Pietro Marcello’s 'La bocca del lupo' tells one love story (that between the members of a couple) nested into another (that of the director for the city). It is an enthralling film, open to its own creative process, finding its distinctive voice in a montage full of formal and narrative experiments. An example of a lively, original cinema that demonstrates that there are still many ways to tell a story and to approach History.
Forever Changed: Cinema, Travel and Dream
The metaphors proliferate in everyday speech: films move us, they even transport us. Movies and means of transportation: books have been written about this duet as constitutive of modernism. Gilles Deleuze, for instance, tagged Franz Kafka as the exemplary 20th century artist who grappled with depicting the disconcerting mutations of the modern world: he imagined, for the first time, strange “mixtures” or “phantom machines” – “a telephone in a train, post-boxes on a boat, cinema in an aeroplane”...
‘lyrical [self-portrait]’
This film is my first avowed self-portrait. The raw materials are a series of videos that I shot with my phone between 2020-2023. This past summer, I played them on several screens and re-filmed them in 4k. The music was composed and performed by Adrian Martin at my request. The spoken text is from “On Being Lyrical”, an essay by Emil Cioran included in his book “On the Heights of Despair”.
Films That Watch Us: ‘Cerrar los ojos’ (Víctor Erice, 2023)
The primordial, the original, the mythical… I believe this realm of exploration is still active in Erice, crucial to his search. But, now, this search is less tied to the cinematic qualities of the perfectly self-enclosed universes created in his first films, while manifesting in the endless echoes and resonances triggered by the intricate interweaving of multiple elements. Stylistically, 'Cerrar los ojos' might be more austere than Erice’s early works—but its narrative structure is unparalleled in complexity and modernism.
‘Ascoltando Riccardo’
A film about spending summer in dark places, the Spanish-Italian connection, Neptune's longing for fusion, ghostly intensity, and the always unavoidable asynchrony of life.
Answered Prayers: ‘Retour à Kotelnitch’ (Emmanuel Carrère, 2003)
Emmanuel Carrère's haunting documentary 'Retour à Kotelnitch' is better understood when put in relation with 'A Russian Novel' and 'Le Soldat Perdu'—two other works by the writer/filmmaker forming a triptych on secrets, disappearances, deaths, mourning, and the hand of destiny.
Readings—Derek Walcott’s ‘Love After Love’
In nights where I feel so utterly rejected, so cut-off from this world that I’d rather let the earth swallow me, I cling to this poem. I say it as a mantra or a prayer. I come to it, but like a refugee (didn’t Leonard Cohen sing this?). I practice without belief—for I do not believe that true wholeness can entirely rely in any self-anything. Still, there’s something in these lines that moves me.
Moonstruckness: Wilde/Bene
A word/image collage with the moon's many faces and effects in Oscar Wilde's 'Salomé'/'La Sainte Courtisane' and Carmelo Bene's 'Salomé'.
Wilde x 2: ‘Salomé’ (Carmelo Bene, 1972)
In this text I discuss a three-minute sequence placed at the start of Carmelo Bene's 'Salomé' which is sourced from another play by Oscar Wilde: 'La Sainte Courtisane'. First, I analyse the specific cinematic treatment that Bene gives to this sequence; afterwards, I dwell on the parallels between said sequence and the ending of the film (which is different from that of Wilde’s play) in order to understand what Bene gains by criss-crossing these two sources.
Sneak Peek at ‘Sensation and Sex’
In 2021, I started a film inspired by a chapter in Lucretius’ 'On the Nature of the Universe'. I was quite excited about the making of this film, but I had to put it off due to… well, life. Earlier this year I returned to the film with some new ideas, but essentially respecting the original impulse that drove me to the project. After some months of frantic work, I’ve completed an 18-minute film titled 'Sensation and Sex'.
Starting Over: Three Ways To (Try To) Change Your Life
If cinema has relentlessly played with the promise of what Chris Marker called a ‘free replay’, it has also often portrayed—sometimes in the course of the same film—its dark reverse-shot: the impossibility of fulfilling such a promise. Here, I will sketch the three basic scenarios involved in the representation of this desire gone wrong, as well as some of the particular structures, strategies and motifs of a group of films that fit this idea especially well.
Five Musical Moments of 2015
What constitutes a good musical moment? In cinema, it’s not enough to have a catchy song or a prestigious orchestral composition. Music may play a crucial role, but it still has to interact both with the other elements of the scene, and with the film as a whole. It is through this intricate, holistic interplay that a musical moment reveals its greatness. Here’s an annotated list with my favourite musical moments of 2015.
Lost Something: Nicolas Roeg’s ‘Walkabout’ & Sibylle Baier’s ‘I Lost Something In The Hills’
I had listened multiple times to “I Lost Something In The Hills”, the second track of 'Colour Green', the only album by German singer-songwriter Sibylle Baier. Then, as if responding to the call made explicit in the fourth verse of the song (“Oh, what images return …”), the images from the ending of Nicolas Roeg’s 'Walkabout' (1971) came back to me …
‘Train Of Thought’
When dealing with certain conditions of the soul, messages that focus on positivity and improvement are often a well-intentioned but escapist route. This is a film about staying within depression: an attempt to look at how it speaks, at how body and mind behave when gripped by it, at the meaning and value of suffering. Made with material gathered across three years, this film pursues a train of thought by overlaying the movements of daily life with the stasis of an overpowering affect.
We Want Roses Too: Walerian Borowczyk’s ‘Immoral Tales’ (1974) and ‘The Beast’ (1975)
There’s something else that knits together the stories of 'Immoral Tales' and 'The Beast': the rejoicing in women’s desire—as an unstoppable force, shining always triumphant on screen, no matter the actual fate of the female protagonists at the end of each tale. These are films about women who listen to their appetites, who venture forth into their libidos, who are in a quest for pleasure. Even when it’s the man who forces on them the narrative scenarios of his fantasy, it’s the explosion of the woman’s desire that has the power to climax the story.
‘Lift’
Filmed inside the most exciting attraction of my little town: a cubicle of one square metre. This film will give you a lift: up and down, up and down. An anti-touristic movie of landscapes, vistas, disseminated reflections, glass and metal. An experiment combining one, two and three screens; a geometrical puzzle of horizontal and vertical lines. Lurches, bumps, pans, and tilts: all to the rhythm of a Kraftwerk medley.
Reverse Shot [III]: ‘Exterior Night’ (Marco Bellocchio, 2022)
Third entry of a three-part text on Marco Bellocchio’s mini-series ‘Exterior Night’, where the director returns to a crucial episode in Italian history that he had already tackled in his masterpiece ‘Good Morning, Night’ (2003): the 1978 kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. This entry explores the religious themes of Christ and the Passion, as well as self-referentiality and the double/alternative endings.
Laugh Motel 