It’s puzzling that HDS’s most important film gets relatively short-shrift in so many of the reports on his death. It took someone of the calibre of Dirk Bogarde to make sure that this film got its due recognition. Anyway, here is Roger Ebert’s review and a Guardian reassessment. Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas” (1984) is the story…
This is one of the better and more interesting academic pieces I’ve come across on Bowie: I suspect there is a cottage industry in the making (I’m currently reading this). In another journal of psychology (I won’t mention the name) a writer offers up the crassest of virtue-signaling tendencies by linking Bowie’s character Thomas Jerome…
Philosophical filmmakers are few and far between, understandably so, but even more depressing is that professional philosophy is perversely plagued by the unphilosophical — i.e. the virtue-signalers and thought and language police. Anyway, one of the few philosophically orientated filmmakers is Wim Wenders and one of my favourite films of all is his Wings of Desire/Der Himmel über Berlin. As…
They all seem to be tweeting This observation by Herzog is totemic of what seems to me like a mass self-induced autism, immersed in a vortex of banality, that society has sunk into. When I observe how oblivious people are of reality when out and about with their device, it’s easy to understand why many of us refuse(d) to…
Malick, the greatest living American filmmaker, has never made the consistently good fully philosophical film that we know he’s quite capable of. I fear that unless he dumps the star actors, he never will. I suppose that beginning with the Thin Red Line (after a 20 year hiatus) he understandably exploited high-priced luvvies eager to embellish their resume with…
Though it’s going on 40 years since Performance was made (1968, released in 1970) it is still the most modern of films with “adult themes” (philosophical and otherwise) from an age when films weren’t primarily made for fuckwits. The themes of social, sexual and gender identity make the fuss being made about these issues now seem so tired…
Born on this day. Memory may be omnipotent and indispensable, but it’s also terribly fragile. The menace is everywhere, not only from its traditional enemy, forgetfulness, but from false memories, like my often repeated story about Paul Nizan’s wedding in the 1930s. The Church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, where he was married, is crystal clear in my…
