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Index: Film commentary

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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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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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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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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The Fortnightly Review