No Time To Die (2021) is a rare instance in Bond fiction–not just the movies, but the novels, the comics, the TV shows, and the rest–of a narrative that comes to complete closure. That says to viewers or readers: this is The End. James Bond will always “return,” we’ve all come to expect. Not this…
Category: Essay
The Parametric Promise of Promising Young Woman (Fennell, 2020)
Promising Young Woman (2020) by first-time director Emerald Fennell is a film that is likely to be discussed and debated for some time to come, and rightly so. Fennell has made a movie with a point. Though not without its nuances, it favors dramatized polemic. It forcefully jogs us from our complacency. It is, in…
“Bresson is still very young…”: Introducing the First Piece Ever Written on Robert Bresson’s Style—and It Features 7 “Lost” Works
Recent discoveries are changing how we view the career of French auteur Robert Bresson (1901–1999). It no longer seems adequate to describe his artistic output as modest, for example. And nor can his reputation for precise, conceptual, even “spiritual” art be ascribed solely to his feature film career (1943–1983). Before we get to some recent…
A “Realist” Pickpocket: How Robert Bresson’s 1959 Film Was Advertised in 1960s Taiwan
In this space I have often commented on the importance of looking into the cultural market for film. Doing so helps us understand the choices filmmakers make in relation to the choices their cultures make. Filmmakers make choices on the set and in terms of how to present or “frame” their work publicly; whereas cultures…
The Art History of Michael Baxandall, Part 5: What Do We Do With Cognitivism?
This, for the time being, is my final entry in a series on art historian Michael Baxandall (1933–2008). The others are here: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. The series is in part a tribute. His work has had a sustained impact on my research–into artistic influence in transnational film practice, the…
The Art History of Michael Baxandall, Part 4: Against Interpretation
This marks the fourth in a series of posts on the writings of art historian Michael Baxandall (1933–2008). If previous entries have examined Baxandall’s thoughts, all related, on the critical history of style, the relation of language and culture to art-making, and the inferential work of the art historian, this piece addresses a very different…
The Art History of Michael Baxandall, Part 3: The Shapes of History
To direct attention to the artist’s market invites misunderstanding. There are those who resent any suggestion that the artist is not an absolute spirit pursuing his aesthetical way like a bird: they will read any proposition about the relation between artist and market as a coarse innuendo about artists following a style because it is…
New Revelations on Bresson’s Early History: Scanning the Digital Archive
As Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar argue in their monumental Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2003), there are numerous benefits to writing history as a quotidien or like a page of the daily press. “A newspaper,” they explain, “can shift the weight of history from continuous story to parallel attractions; it requires a peculiar kind of…
Disney World-Building (and -Telling): The Transmedia Experience of AVATAR: FLIGHT OF PASSAGE (2017)
Some time ago I spent five days at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and I wanted to share a few thoughts that will perhaps be of interest to readers of this blog. For in Disney’s attractions, we see, in ways I had not anticipated, fascinating points of intersection between numerous phenomena I’ve often written…
Why the Radical Turn? A Speculative Theory about Robert Bresson’s Late Period (1969-1983)
I’ve recently become convinced of a certain theory that explains Bresson’s shift to more topical subject matter after May ’68—films set in Paris, addressing the entanglements of modern social life, politics, etc. I think here of Quatre nuits d’un rêveur (1971), Le diable, probablement (1977), and L’argent (1983). As some of you know, this has long…
Moving Patterns 