Dialogic Cinephilia - August 24, 2020

Barnard, Clio and Andrew Kötting. "Dark River." The Cinematologists #58 (February 22, 2018) ["The arrival of a new film by Clio Barnard promises an in-depth and uncompromising study of character and place; Dark River, her new film set in the harsh and beautiful Yorkshire farming landscape, is no exception. The northern locale links to her previous films The Arbor and The Self Giant, as does the bleak and brutal tragedy of the human stories. However, this rural tale, based on the Rose Tremain novel Trespass, is somewhat of a departure from the urban working-class focus of those previous films. In this Q&A, presented in association with Cinecity, Clio talks about the film with long-time friend Andrew Kötting, touching on the development of the script from the book, the casting, her minimalist aesthetic, the P.J. Harvey soundtrack and the challenges of the rural locations."]

Black, Jeremy. "What are Empires and Why Do They Matter?" Arguing History (November 14, 2019)




Bramble, Serena. "The Heart is a “Lonely” Hunter: On Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place." Senses of Cinema #59 (June 2011)

Davis, Erik. "Weird Shit." Boing Boing (July 14, 2014)

Michael Denniston and Dave Giannini "Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation." A Podcast Directed By (July 7, 2019)

Morris, Errol. "Anatomy of a Photograph: Authoritarianism in America." The Atlantic (August 22, 2020)

Robinson, Andrew. "Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power." Cease Fire (September 9, 2011) ["The dominant worldview of medieval Europe was of a natural order which is hierarchical, stable, monolithic and immutable, but poised on the brink of disaster or ‘cosmic terror’, and hence in need of constant maintenance of order. This is similar to Aristotle’s view. For Bakhtin, such a view is oppressive and intolerant. It closes language to change. The fear of ‘cosmic terror’, the pending collapse of order if things got out of control (or the threat posed by the Real to the master-signifier), was used by elites to justify hierarchy and to subdue popular revolt and critical consciousness. Today, we might think of this vision of monolithic order in terms of fantasies of ‘broken Britain’, of civilisation under siege from extremists, and a discourse of risk-management (and the crisis-management of ‘ungovernability’) in which ‘terrorism’, disease, protest, deviance and natural disaster fuse into a secularised vision of cosmic collapse. This vision of collapse has infiltrated legal and political discourse to such a degree that any excess of state power seems ‘proportionate’ against this greater evil. The folk view expressed in carnival and carnivalesque, and related speech-genres such as swearing and popular humour, opposes and subverts this vision. For Bakhtin, cosmic terror and the awe induced by the system’s violent power are the mainstays of its affective domination. Folk culture combats the fear created by cosmic terror.""]






Totaro, Donato. "Female Empowerment in the “Small World” films of Midsommar (2019, Ari Aster) and The Other Lamb (2019, Malgorzata Szumowska)." Off Screen 23.12 (December 2019)