“With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago; And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason, Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro, Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken, Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent Out naked on the…
Light has not always stood for reason, or for the power of the mind. All the tropes that became common during the Hellenistic era and Neoplatonic thought, and that were later recycled during the Enlightenment (when celebration was allotted to all things Greek) had a common ancestor. Light, before that, used to stand simply for…
“What’s in a name?” asked Romeo in the whirling voice of William Shakespeare to a Juliet whose smell was as sweet as roses. Difficult to say what’s in it. Doubtless it is essential, whether to what the thing is, to what it turns out to be or just as our means to refer to it….
Looking is different than seeing in the same way in which seeing is different than watching. Looking necessarily entails as much the eyes of the one who looks as the eyes of the one who’s been looked at. A look is impossible without reciprocity, for no look can be given if no look can be…
“For if the darkness and corruption leave a vestige of the thoughts that once we had. Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad” — Christina Rossetti CalArts Professor and film essayist Thom Andersen, acclaimed for his 2003 documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” has brought his latest…
The power of one man can change the world because he can change the communities around him, one by one. But the power of the community can change the man and the world much faster — for better or for worse — because there’s undeniable strength in numbers while the strength of one can sometimes…
Horror fans, like myself, are a funny bunch — we sit comfortably on the couch, happily eating popcorn while onscreen characters are tormented and terrorized. We devour film after film, most of them admittedly poor in quality, in the hopes of finding the diamond in the horror rough — the one film that manages to…
