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Category Archives: Politics

METROPOLITAN OPERA | From the House of the Dead

[the trash collectors] Leoš Janáček, From the House of the Dead [Z mrtvého domu] Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 8PM Production: Patrice Chéreau Associate Director: Thierry Thieu Niang Conductor: Esa-Pekka Salonen Main Cast: Willard White (Alexandr Gorjančikov), Eric Stoklossa (Aljeja) Stefan Margita (Filka Morozov) How to make a narrative of so relentless yet monotonous, time-ravaging and […]

Revolutionary Roads: Robert Kramer at the Harvard Film Archive

A long-form poet of political cinema, Robert Kramer (1939-1999) may be the greatest American filmmaker we hardly knew. His unique alloys of fiction and documentary chronicle the doings and undoings of the revolutionary Left from the Sixties through the Eighties. Yet the perspectives offered in his films are prismatically personal: the hesitations of a militant […]

‘Damage’ (dir. Malle, 1992)

Like Last Tango in Paris and Unfaithful, Damage is a film that explores—with punishing severity—the nightmarish consequences of lustful abandon. The acting excels within the category of tense facial tableaux: Jeremy Irons as MP Stephen Fleming, at once wooden and craven, Juliette Binoche’s Anna Barton trancey and transfixing, her gaze by turns pleading and rejecting. […]

Labor histories

Ingmar Bergman, in his introduction to Four Screenplays: There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its […]