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I’ve been watching a lot of Poverty Row movies lately, and a lot of b-movies from the ‘50s and early ‘60s. John H. Auer, Edward D. Wood, Jr., Edgar G. Ulmer, directors of that nature.

The ostensible climax of Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (and, by extension, of the entire Twilight franchise) is arguably the most common for Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking today: a large-scale battle on a big field between two groups roughly approximating “good” and “evil.” Despite this, it is also one of the most utterly strange, singularContinue reading “Will and Negation: Notes on the Ending of Twilight: Breaking Dawn”

First of all, eyes are not what we use to see, literally or metaphorically. Vision in this sense doesn’t actually exist. This is settled science, as the mystics would say. We don’t actually “use” anything to “see.” That’s not what’s going on. Sight is something that happens to us. When the second plane crashed intoContinue reading “What Are Eyes?”

One of the more profound sicknesses of the human creature is the compulsion to consume art which mirrors in some way what they perceive to be the “character” of their the reality they find themselves in at the moment. The soldier plays Call of Duty, the suicidal depressive listens to The Smiths, and the “self-isolating”Continue reading “Some Reflections on the Single-Location Drama”

This is the text of a presentation I gave at NYU’s 2020 Cinema Studies Student Conference, as part of a panel with two other presenters. I’ve slightly altered it for readability, but otherwise this is what I said in front of 20-30 people. In 1837, in the Ninth Brigewater Treatise, Charles Babbage declares that “NoContinue reading “The Stone Tape and the Video Tape: Folk Horror and Film Viewing”

I think I should state clearly first and foremost that I regard Michael Bay as, fundamentally, a fascist filmmaker. That’s the language his movies are written in, and to attempt to obfuscate or minimize that would be doing a disservice them. Any attempt at some sort of “left Bayhem” would be as misguided as anContinue reading “Baysian Logic: 13 Hours on the Outskirts of the American Empire”

I got the chance to watch Liberté, Albert Serra’s new movie, the other night. It was one of the most controversial movies on the festival circuit last year, and it still hasn’t (as of this writing) gotten any sort of public release. As such, I figure it’s probably worth setting down some my thoughts onContinue reading “On Liberté”

Note: I wrote this back in Summer 2018 for fun but didn’t have anywhere to post it so it just sat on my hard drive. I’ve tried to touch it up a bit for presentation here but the core argument et cetera is fundamentally the same as I laid out way back then. Tobe HooperContinue reading “A Lamb is a Lambchop: On the Bodies in Tobe Hooper’s Mortuary”

A few months ago a mutual of mine DM’d me in relation to a minor argument I had semi-accidentally instigated. While we were hashing it out he told me that, as an undergrad in cinema studies, he was “kinda having a crisis” over the value of filmmaking, even radical filmmaking, and asked me what, ifContinue reading “Some Notes on “Radical Cinema” in the Year 2020″