Epic Out, Epic In

Rama Burshtein, the Israeli director of “Fill the Void,” at right on the film set. (Photo: Vered Adir/Sony Picture Classics) Some art forms favor expansion. Those are the ones that ask—require?—you to untether yourself and be taken outward, into a nimbus that exists beyond the quotidian of terrestrial constraints. The epic experience in art is […]

Living Outside Interpretation

From “The Return” (Photo: Nathaniel Dorsky) Manohla Dargis has written a stop-in-your-tracks kind of piece about the filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky in the Sunday Times. His rhapsodic appreciation of a body of work completely captured me even though I have never had the oppoortunity to see any of Dorsky’s films. (His book, Devotional Cinema, is now […]

Kieferland

Anselm Kiefer in the documentary, “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow.” (Photo: Alive Mind Cinema) _____ Rubble is the future. Because everything that is passes. There is a wonderful chapter in Isaiah that says: grass will grow over your cities…Isaiah sees the city and the different layers over it, the grass, and then another city, […]

Fashion as Metaphor

“The world of fashion. I’m interested in the world, not in fashion! But, maybe I was too quick to put down fashion. Why not look at it without prejudice? Why not examine it like any other industry, like the movies for example?” I resonate with these words from Wim Wenders’ unforgettable film, Notebooks on Cities […]