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One needs to take with a grain of salt the contemporary critical tendency to validate a work of art by calling it "dark," "darker" or "darkest." Understandably, defenders of Naruse want to stake out a separate territory for him, but perhaps we do him a disservice by exaggerating his pessimism. In a…

Reading aloud from Jean-François Lyotard’s viciously difficult 1974 book, Libidinal Economy, Fisher relishes the work’s most polemical passages, as Lyotard seems to prophesy the patronising gaze cast upon James Turner Street, putting the producers on blast, who “dare not say the only important thin…

[...] "sublime" may in fact be the operative term, if we use the recent definition provided by French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard: "An inevitable sadness coming from the inconsistency of all things, it is also the exaltation of thought passing beyond the limits of what can be presented."

Painters love Lynch. His compositions are exquisite, the frame divided into stylized pools of shadow and light. Then there is his signature color sense, that brownish-blue acidic palette that seems to derive most from art photographers like William Eggleston and Cindy Sherman. In Wild at Heart, how…

Schrader once wrote a book called Transcendental Style in Film, which focused on such great filmmakers as Ozu, Dreyer, Rossellini and Bresson. The transcendental style was developed, according to Schrader, "to express the Holy": it is characterized by an austere, formalist rigor; a deep respect for…