POST TENEBRAS LUX
dir. Carlos Reygadas
2012
Employing a distorting filter over the camera lens, Carlos Reygadas’s elliptical drama pushes the “reality” of the film-image into a perpetual state of uncertainty. The viewing experience is similar to that of a stroll through an art gallery, in which each new image becomes a process of discovery, relation and accumulation.
WORLD OF ECHO
Arthur Russell
1986
Exploring the full acoustic spectrum of the cello, from zither-like shreds to deep, bassy thuds, Arthur Russell’s album World of Echo sounds as though it is playing from inside the subconscious of the Western musical canon. It is an album of flow, of the entropic push-and-pull of the natural world that Russell mirrors with his instrument.
I-BE AREA
dir. Ryan Trecartin
2007
Communicating with accelerated reality-TV verbosity and painted in flamboyant neon makeup, the characters in Ryan Trecartin’s I-Be Area grapple with a hyperlinked era. In an interview around its completion, Trecartin said, “What identifies people is not necessarily their bodies anymore; it’s all the relationships they maintain with others. You are your area, rather than you are yourself.”
THE HEADLESS WOMAN
dir. Lucrecia Martel
2008
In The Headless Woman, the protagonist Veró drifts into a catatonic state after becoming convinced she has killed a child. An allegory for los desaparecidos, the state-sanctioned “disappearance” of as many as 30,000 leftist citizens during Argentina’s Dirty War, the film is about what we choose not to see, and the reciprocal impacts of ignorance on all segments of society.
IN VANDA’S ROOM
dir. Pedro Costa
2000
Pedro Costa’s three-hour docudrama explores precarity in a world that increasingly denies physical space for it. The film centres on Vanda and her neighbours as they smoke heroin and converse, while their neighbourhood Fontainhas is slowly demolished. The work’s moments of Vermeer-esque beauty are all the more remarkable for how they are integrated within a critique of neoliberalism’s degradation of beauty itself.
SPEEDBOAT
Renata Adler
1976
Ostensibly about Jen, a journalist living in New York, the Modernist style of Speedboat delves into the inescapable nature of interdependence and literature’s failure to reflect life as it is lived. As Adler notes, “Every love story, every commercial trade, every secret, every matter in which trust is involved, is a gentle transaction of hostages. Everything is, to a degree, in the custody of every other thing.”
BECAUSE I’M WORTH IT
Copeland
2014
In a subversion of the confessional female songwriter idiom, Copeland’s dank, disorienting album actively discourages identification. The featureless album cover, somewhere between a passport photo and a mugshot, calls into question who is conferring worth and even who the “I” in question is supposed to be.
FAMILY TYRANNY
Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley
1987
In Family Tyranny, a character styled on the fathers of 1980s sitcoms forces handfuls of a mayonnaise-like substance into a hollowed-out melon. The semiotic abstraction of the image conjures a different, more insidious kind of horror than that of its grotesque immediate representation. It is what it isn’t. ◉