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Cluster index: Simon Collings

Carrying the past.

Tuesday, 6 February 2024

Fortnightly Review Film Commentary.  The Afterlight by Charlie Shackleton 1.37:1 | mono | black & white | 82 minutes an interview By Simon Collings. • harlie Shackleton’s film The Afterlight is a collage of clips from hundreds of films from around the world. It brings together a cast of actors all of whom are no […]

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Some guts

Tuesday, 16 January 2024

By SIMON COLLINGS. with collages by John Goodby. ◊ Now how about a night-cap before turning in Mr Greb, it is Greb isn’t it, or perhaps you fancy something stronger? —Ann Quin, Berg So, for example, if I should say, in a letter to a friend, ‘Our brother Tom has just got the piles,’ a […]

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Robert Desnos, screenwriter.

Wednesday, 6 December 2023

A Fortnightly Film Commentary.Minuit à quatorze heures (1925) | Les mystères du Métropolitain  (1930) |Les récifs de l’amour (1930) | Y a des punaises dans le rôti de porc  (1933) ◊ By SIMON COLLINGS. he surrealist poet Robert Desnos was a passionate advocate of the power of cinema. He believed film had the potential to free […]

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A Notebook of Materials Made under Stress.

Saturday, 24 June 2023

Simon Collings: ‘Mottram’s life and work have been celebrated in recent years in a series of conferences held at King’s College London, where he taught.’

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On the small stuff.

Saturday, 20 May 2023

Simon Collings: ‘The texts are ludic, baffling, funny, and thought provoking by turns… In the poem based on ‘itself’, we’re advised ‘remember the line of association controls itself’, and ‘the sentence reads itself as we listen’.

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The Yellow-brick Mind of David Lynch.

Friday, 17 March 2023

Simon Collings: ‘Scratch the surface and a Lynch film is no more threatening, it seems, than the most hackneyed commercial entertainment picture.’

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An activist from New York.

Saturday, 31 December 2022

Simon Collings: ‘A central concern in Diawara’s work is what he calls ‘Afro-pessimism’, the sense of hopelessness about the continent expressed by both external commentators and by many people living in Africa.’

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Poetry, undefined yet concrete.

Monday, 12 September 2022

Simon Collings: ‘The concrete poetry movement emerged in several countries contemporaneously in the 1950s – Sweden, Switzerland, Brazil, Austria, Japan.’

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Citizen Fisher.

Monday, 2 May 2022

Simon Collings: ‘In the margin next to this passage Fisher has written: ‘This is terrible, in its values as well as its narrative. But it’s true. True voyeur. The horror-freak-stuff is worst. But the point of view needs doing; and my own part as real voyeur. Everybody’s a voyeur at this time.’’

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The big noise in the night.

Friday, 11 March 2022

Simon Collings: ‘Travelling in Colombia, Weerasethakul heard many accounts of the way the trauma of recent conflict persists in the present. Early in the film we see a young man on a busy Bogotá street dive to the pavement, thinking he has heard gunfire, when a bus backfires, an echo of incidents from years earlier.’

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A smile that melts.

Thursday, 11 November 2021

Simon Collings: ‘Bergson described ‘duration’ as ‘a continuity which is really lived, but artificially decomposed for the greater convenience of customary knowledge.’ Time spent in waiting is central to Innocence, and for Mroz highlights a sense of “protracted lived duration’ which stands in sharp contrast to the ticking of clocks heard throughout the film.’

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On poetry and the environmental crisis.

Saturday, 28 August 2021

Rae Armantrout: ‘I’ll read any good book at the edge where research science brushes up against ontology. And, yes, I have gotten ideas, facts, quotes from this reading to use in poems.’

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Holy cow.

Sunday, 27 June 2021

Simon Collings: ‘This is the context in which we find the film’s principal characters, Cookie and King-Lu, trying to survive: a frontier trading network only recently established where violence is rife and international political influences shape local governance. The only access to the area from the east was by horse or on foot. No route through the Rockies suitable for wagons had been discovered at that point.’

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Episode 38 of ‘Living Dead’ and two more poems.

Friday, 7 May 2021

By SIMON COLLINGS. . Episode 38: Living dead ‘I’M A NOBODY’ Bill says to Frank. ‘What have I accomplished? Precisely nothing. When I’m dead, I’ll disappear without trace.’ ‘Two caramel lattes,’ Frank says to the barista. ‘When I was a kid,’ Bill continues, ‘I used to think I’d be somebody one day, someone people would […]

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Gianfranco Rosi’s marginalia.

Saturday, 27 March 2021

Simon Collings: ‘Rosi films two horses in an urban area at night. We see the horses waiting for their owners, then one of them, a small white horse, standing alone. Later the two horses gallop toward us down the street and pass out of the frame, followed a few moments later by someone on a motorbike going the other way. These are actual events Rosi observed and filmed, but they might equally be from a dream.’

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The Fortnightly Review