Dialogic Cinephilia - June 9, 2020

Confused about the global protests of, the complaints against, and the calls to defund police - John Oliver would like to help give you some clarity. Really gets to the heart of the matter.


Biagetti, Samuel. "Freemasonry: Its Origins, Its Myths, Its Rituals." Historiansplaining (July 2020)




Cooper, Travis Warren. "Kogonada's Urban Realism." Film Criticism 44.1 (January 2020) ["Kogonada’s first full-length feature film, Columbus (2017) is about a little-known Midwestern city and bastion of modern architecture. In method and content, Columbus is both ethnographic and playful, documentary and fiction. This article argues that Kogonada embodies a neorealist filmmaking method and in doing so defies traditional boundaries on multiple levels, prioritizing marginality through a preoccupation with visual lingering. Through its neorealist, ethnographic gaze, the film critically attends to entrenched hierarchies and divisions regarding gender, race, built artifacts, and socioeconomics. As a neorealist project, Columbus is an emotive meditation on urban space and rich visual theory of architecture, design, and metropolitics."]

Dickey, Colin. "The Rise and Fall of Facts." Columbia Journalism Review (Fall 2019)

Elias, Christopher Michael. "Sons of God: Postwar Gender and Spirituality in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life." Film Criticism 44. 1 (January 2020)

Kotevska, Tamara and Ljubomir Stefanov. "Honeyland." Film at Lincoln Center #237 (July 24, 2019) ["The Sundance World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner, directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov, is an evocative, often outrageously funny modern-day parable of the Good Samaritan."]

Petkova, Savina. "Everything Is Political: Pablo Larraín Discusses Ema." Notebook (May 1, 2020)

Thacker, Eugene. "Horror of Philosophy: Three Volumes." New Books Network Seminar (September 28, 2015) ["Eugene Thacker‘s wonderful Horror of Philosophy series includes three books – In the Dust of this Planet (Zero Books, 2011), Starry Speculative Corpse (Zero Books, 2015), and Tentacles Longer than Night (Zero Books, 2015) – that collectively explore the relationship between philosophy (especially as it overlaps with demonology, occultism, and mysticism) and horror (especially of the supernatural sort). Each book takes on a particular problematic using a particular form from the history of philosophy, from the quaestio, lectio, and disputatio of medieval scholarship, to shorter aphoristic prose, to productive “mis-readings” of works of horror as philosophical texts and vice versa. Taken together, the books thoughtfully model the possibilities born of a comparative scholarly approach that creates conversations among works that might not ordinarily be juxtaposed in the same work: like Nishitani, Kant, Yohji Yamamoto, and Fludd; or Argento, Dante, and Lautramont. Though they explore topics like darkness, pessimism, vampiric cephalopods, and “black tentacular voids,” these books vibrate with life and offer consistent and shining inspiration for the careful reader. Anyone interested in philosophy, theology, modern literature and cinema, literatures on life and death, the history of horror…or really, anyone at all who appreciates thoughtful writing in any form should grab them – grab all of them! – and sit somewhere comfy, and prepare to read, reflect, and enjoy."]

Yarmuth, Aaron.   "Rethinking the police: no traffic stops, no-knock warrants." LEO Weekly (June 4, 2020)  [MB - For nearly two months during the pandemic police in my area were virtually absent/invisible. Chaos did not erupt, crime did not go up, and Darwinian struggles between my neighbors over resources did not take place. It pushed me to re-visit the realization/thought of why does a large part of our society believe we need to flood the streets/our-neighborhoods with police and have them poking into ever aspects of our lives/interactions? How have many of us have been conditioned to believe we are not safe without police and what does that say about the instillation of our own unconscious police inside our own heads? It reminds me of reading Michel Foucault's history 'Discipline and Punish' where he remarks on a "secret history of the police" where greater attention is paid to public health, social welfare and regulating the marketplace than investigating and arresting criminals. Is this what we want? Should we change this aspect of our civil society?]