Dialogic Cinephilia - February 19, 2020

Eggers, Robert. "The Lighthouse." The Film Comment Podcast (October 23, 2019) ["The Lighthouse is the mind-bending new movie out from Robert Eggers, a director who’s making a career out of revisiting America’s primal past in vividly imagined period films. In 2015, Eggers won the Best Directing Award at Sundance for The Witch, a chilling piece of horror set in a colonial New England settlement. In The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson star as two lighthouse keepers, a grizzled old-timer and his new apprentice, in 19th century Maine. For our latest Film Comment Talk at Film at Lincoln Center, FC Editor-in-Chief Nicolas Rapold spoke with Eggers about the art, craft, and angst of making the movie, fleshing out the details of its setting, and what he’d do with an unlimited budget."]

Galvani, Alison. "Yale Study Says Medicare for All Would Save U.S. $450 Billion, Prevent Nearly 70,000 Deaths a Year." Democracy Now (February 19, 2020) ["As the Democratic presidential hopefuls prepare to take to the debate stage tonight, we turn to a central issue of the campaign: Medicare for All. In a new study, Yale scholars have found that Medicare for All will save Americans more than $450 billion and prevent 68,000 deaths every year. The study in The Lancet — one of the oldest and most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals — found that Medicare for All, supported by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, will save money and is more cost-effective than “Medicare for All Who Want It, “a model supported by Pete Buttigieg. Sanders referenced the study at a campaign rally in Carson City, Nevada. For more, we go to New Haven, Connecticut, where we’re joined by Alison Galvani, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at Yale’s School of Public Health. She is the lead author of the new Lancet study, “Improving the prognosis of health care in the USA.”"]

Juhyundred. "Reading Colonialism in Parasite." Tropics of Meta (February 17, 2020)

McAlevey, Jane. "It's Time to Retire the Term 'Middle-Class.'" Citations Needed #91 (October 23, 2019) ["The term “middle class” is used so much by pundits and politicians, it could easily be the Free Space in any political rhetoric Bingo card. After all, who’s opposed to strengthening, widening, and protecting the “middle class”? Like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights”, “middle class” is an unimpeachable, unassailable label that evokes warm feelings and a sense of collective morality.
But the term itself, always slippery and changing based on context, has evolved from a vague aspiration marked by safety, a nice home, and a white picket fence into something more sinister, racially-coded, and deliberately obscuring. The middle class isn’t about concrete, material positive rights of good housing and economic security––it’s a capitalist carrot hovering over our heads telling us such things are possible if we Only Work Harder. More than anything, it's a way for politicians to gesture towards populism without the messiness of mentioning––much less centering––the poor and poverty. This week we are joined by Jane McAlevey, a union organizer, scholar and Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center."]

Pan's Labyrinth (Spain/Mexico: Guillermo Del Toro, 2006) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)




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