Desire as Pedagogy: ‘The Academy of Muses’ (José Luis Guerin, 2015)

In 'The Academy of Muses', pedagogy is portrayed as the circulation of desire between teacher, students, and texts—while becoming also the trigger of the central dramatic conflict: Rosa, Raffaele’s wife, starts to feel that her husband’s teaching philosophy is a threat to their marriage… Desire is not just the literal (and literary) object of study in Pinto’s seminar; it is the force that propels the whole film.

That Cube Caught My Fantasy…

Some months ago, I found in YouTube this wonderful video of Carl Gustav Jung at his Bollingen Tower. The footage prominently features a stone that he carved and put in his garden, next to the lake, as an offering for his 75th birthday. Following the trail of two sets of image-associations, this essay goes from Telesphoros (the bewitching figure carved in one of the sides of the stone) to Nicolas Roeg's 'Don't Look Now' and Krzysztof Kieślowski's 'Dekalog I'.

‘Birth’ (P.S.)

This is a post-scriptum to my previous entry (which includes my latest film). I've never done one of these before, but when there are discoveries triggering such effusions of belated emotion and refracted recognition, it's only fair that one acknowledges them. Thanks to a beautiful book on translation by Kate Briggs, I've come upon a brief essay by Elena Ferrante about a sentence in (Gustave Flaubert's?) 'Madame Bovary' that has pursued her throughout the years since, at fourteen, she read the novel in the original French...

‘The Burning House’

Last summer—when I was at my most depressed and in the midst of a long relocation process—I painted, over black cardboard, a blue, female figure standing at the threshold of a house already in flames. In my mind, there's no doubt that the house is in flames because I am in flames, and that I stand at the threshold of a future already ravaged, already lost...

The Long Road: ‘Liberté et Patrie’ (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 2002)

The 'and' functions to always carry the links forward—but it also operates across each pair ("freedom and fatherland, fatherland and freedom": the visual and aural back-and-forth is a constant in the film). It's the movement effected by the 'and' that frees the terms from themselves, and frees the pairs from themselves—threading relations that multiply and amplify, that give substance, background and meaning, that constellate a veritable cosmos out of those two initial notions...

Defiled Garden: ‘The Invention of Morel’ (Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1940)

There's a passage of the novel I’ve always liked. Amongst the group of tourists, there's a woman – Faustine – who every evening contemplates the setting sun. The hero, who has fallen for this woman just by looking at her from the distance, decides to give her something. First he tries – I've tried it, too – the good old, conventional approach: conversation. But he's not seen, he's not heard. And, so, he makes an offering to her: a garden of flowers – which he refers to as his "last poetic recourse". Well, writing is this garden of flowers...

Ravishment: ‘Carol’ (Todd Haynes’, 2015)

In an interview for the French magazine Positif, Todd Haynes declared that the descriptions in Patricia Highsmith’s 'The Price of Salt' – the novel on which 'Carol' is based – reminded him of Roland Barthes' 'A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments'. It seems to me, however, that the film – through a series of details and choices that have their origin either in Phyllis Nagy's script adaptation or in Haynes' aesthetics and mise en scène – has a far stronger affinity with Barthes’ text than Highsmith’s novel...

Two Notions of Fatherland: Godard/Kafka

A word/image collage on home, fatherland, writing, and cinema. With quotes by Franz Kafka and Jean-Luc Godard...

Gravity and Grace: ‘Wings of Desire’ (Wim Wenders, 1987)

At the end of 'Wings of Desire', Damiel – the guardian angel turned human – meets Marion, the woman he's fallen in love with. The scene is built on a long monologue, delivered by her, that will be filmed, almost entirely, from a single camera set-up. Upon watching the recently restored version of the film in a cinema, I was struck by a detail of which I didn't have the slightest recollection: the incredible force of a cut that, midway in the scene, introduces an astonishing close-up of Marion...

Teenage Daydream: ‘Les Enfants terribles’ (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950)

History tells us that the collaboration between Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean Cocteau was neither easy nor sweet. “Before, we were brothers; during the shooting, we couldn’t stand each other”, said the director. Unlike in his debut feature 'Le Silence de la mer', where he adapted Vercors’ novel with great fidelity but also in total independence and freedom, the more collaborative nature of this project prompted many discussions. However, if 'Les Enfants terribles' is today such a fascinating film is also thanks to these artistic disagreements...