Letterboxd — Your life in film

If nothing else, I do massively respect Zahedi’s devotion to the bit of there not being a bit, which is almost a bit in and of itself. The upfront immoralism Caveh holds and puts on blast in his work is what everyone knows him for; the point of his work is that none of it can be mistaken for being anything other than exactly what it is, so a lot of the intrigue in watching a Zahedi film is to…

Gatten has seemingly operated under and with the same concerns throughout his whole career. The way(s) in which the main materials of Shadows (paint) interact with the temperature, humidity and light in the room Gatten is filming in (change of daylight, clouds in the background, etc.) all under the same white balance of the DSLR - it’s easy to notice how, conceptually, Shadows is made of similar impulses as the What the Water Said series. While the natural impressions/reactions of the paint are…

Examining labor conditions in modern China is perhaps what Bing’s work is best known for. The first section of his most widely celebrated film to date, Tie Xi Qu, examines the workers and factories of the fizzling industrial Shenyang. Another formidable work in Bing’s catalogue, Crude Oil, looks at an entire workday of a group of oil field workers – it goes without saying how easily comparable this is to 15 Hours.

A more all-around, encapsulating description for Bing’s films…

A big difficulty with writing on Markopoulos’ work is that, aside from trying to write on one of the greatest, the general unknowability of his filmography (and the man himself) requires one to take a number of creative liberties and to make assumptions with how a particular piece may relate to, act or build upon both prior and following films. One could extend this to any other number of filmmakers such as Brakhage and his monolithic 300+ large filmography, though…

“For me, locations and beautiful people have always been the backbone of my work.” - Gregory Markopoulos 

Portrait-oriented films I feel have an inherent “simple” quality - both in general construction (at least the PERCEIVED make-up) as well as in how the works are taken from the audience. The generic form of portrait film involves filming a subject (persons/people) for a given reason(s) or context by the involved artists; this form, at least in my experience, allows quite a bit…

The sensuality behind Warhol’s non-screen test yet still portrait-oriented films like Sleep and Kiss are obvious relatives to something like this film but I often hang on to the idea and handling of not just homosexuality but sexuality at large in oftentimes conflicting ways when it comes to Warhol. The tenderness of his first films like the two above-mentioned progressively seem to become more done away with as Warhol kept making films, especially when moving into works in the latter…

Maybe the most immediate indicator of Lupe being an outlier in Warhol's Sedgwick room dramas or whatever you may want to call them is the use of color film and its affects. Much of the make-up of the film is much the same to that of “similar” Warhol films of this nature (by this I mean the Sedgwick-oriented ones) where we see Edie lying in bed with either a man in the room with her or making conversation with an…

The myth/story of Faust is perhaps the most easily and closely associated classical legend to contemporary life; that of people in indefinite disillusionment to life and those around them regardless of financial or social standing opting for a sort of “break” or large opportunity to get ahead regardless of cost.

This particular reading of the story comes not from german myth or Goethe’s literary landmark but rather of the renditions of Faust from artists from the previous century; in the…

The more I sit and think on the film, the more I view it as a sort-of sister film to anticipation of the night. Both these films deal ultimately in the approach of death. Anticipation is much more dire than god of day because of its conveyance of failure to persevere in the face of despair; the film ending in the aptly named “shadow man” hanging himself on a tree. It’s of the utmost importance to take into account the…