High Art: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
For Nan Goldin “survival was an art,” photography “a sublimation for sex,” and the art world “bullshit. Times Square was real life.” These are just some of the insights gleaned from Laura...
Author: Lauren Wissot
Human MOOP: Matter Out of Place
Nikolaus Geyrhalter has described his static-camera, nearly architecturally-composed, observational docs as “archival material, which people will dig out in 50 or 100 years.” Which makes perfect...
No fail-safe: Hogir Hirori’s “Sabaya”
Like many film journalists, not to mention jury members, who caught Hogir Hirori’s now discredited Sabaya at this year’s Sundance I was riveted, calling it (in the intro to my interview with...
Artistic history: The Harun Farocki Institute celebrates American Artist-in-Residence Cathy Lee Crane
“What is a poetic cinema? That’s a question I’ve been thinking about, a question yet to be answered. It can’t just be that it's not linear. It has to propose a different kind of language and...
Why trans bodies matter (hint: It’s the Patriarchy, Stupid)
In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe, leaving reproductive rights to be strangled by the groping hands of overwhelmingly male Republican state legislatures across the US,...
True Crime Nuance: HBO’s “Mind Over Murder”
On its surface, Mind Over Murder - the titillatingly titled six-part doc series that debuted June 20 on HBO - might seem merely the latest addition to a bloated, true-crime juggernaut. And yet in the...
True Romance: Kamikaze Hearts
Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts, originally released in 1986 and now set to screen in a new 2K restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive (May 13 in NYC at BAM and May 20 in LA at...
A Portrait of the Artist through an Audiotape: The Capote Tapes and Billie
Nearly a quarter century ago, legendary journo and The Paris Review co-founder George Plimpton published “Truman Capote: In which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall...
Celebrating Diverse Voices at the 2021 SCAD Savannah Film Festival
For me the 2021 SCAD Savannah Film Festival, held both online and in person (masks and vaccine mandates strictly enforced) this past October in lovely Savannah, Georgia, was undoubtedly one of the...
What I learned from watching Listening to Kenny G
Among the issues splitting Americans into tribal camps, perhaps only abortion and guns are more divisive than Kenny G. (Or maybe not. My left-leaning family members are pretty much in agreement on...