On “12 Years a Slave” [Harper’s]
“Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” So begins one of the most emblematic novels of the twentieth century and so, more or...
View ArticleOn the exhibits “Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module” and “The...
Such is loosely the premise of two very different New York shows, the New Museum’s “Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module” and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s “The Shadows Took Shape,” both...
View ArticleOn Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” [NYRBlog]
Lars von Trier has made several great films (Dogville, Melancholia). He has also orchestrated a number of provocations, the strongest of which is The Idiots (1998), a movie that anticipates Borat,...
View ArticleOn Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” [Tablet]
Dark, savage, excessive in its add-ons and murky in its details, Aronofsky’s rip-roaring re-reading and re-scripting of Genesis: 6-10 is not a blockbuster for the ages. But it is likely the most...
View ArticleOn Michael Snow as photographer [Artforum]
A humble, relentless, more or less continuous zoom shot taking forty-five minutes to traverse a Canal Street loft into a photograph pasted on the far wall, Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) provided...
View ArticleOn Sholem Aleichem and Fiddler on the Roof [The Guardian]
The Russian-speaking Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) was, in his lifetime, a prolific popular writer and a failed playwright. In death, he defined a culture. Read more…
View ArticleOn Manakama and Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab [NYRBlog]
Manakamana, the new documentary by anthropologist Stephanie Spray and filmmaker Pacho Velez, is a motion picture that transports the viewer to a mountaintop Hindu temple, as well as back in time to the...
View ArticleOn Sigmar Polke’s films [Artforum]
Great film installations—Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, 1993, say, or Christian Marclay’s The Clock, 2010—use the fact of motion pictures to hypostatize time. Lesser ones raise questions about...
View ArticleOn Ida [Tablet]
“So. You are a Jewish nun,” a cynical Polish Communist greets her teenaged niece with just a touch of sarcasm. Read more…
View ArticleOn The Immigrant & The Grand Budapest Hotel [Tablet]
“The Jew is the one whom other men consider a Jew,” according to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential reasoning. Thus anti-Semitism can exist without Jews. So can philo-Semitism, and so can the nebulous...
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