Author Archive for: ‘George Kouvaros’
“Those Who Wait”: The Misfits and Late Style
“Those Who Wait” is the title of an essay, first published in 1922, by Siegfried Kracauer.[1] In this essay, Kracauer employs the image of waiting to describe a mass of people whose connection to one another is based on a sense of “metaphysical suffering from the lack of a higher meaning in the world.”[2] According to Kracauer, these people have …
Read MoreIthaka, or the Open Voyage: Jonas Mekas’ Lost Lost Lost and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
I ‘Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers’, writes John Berger, ‘but, also, undoing the very meaning of the world and – at its most extreme – abandoning oneself to the unreal which is the absurd’. [1] Berger acknowledges that emigration can be driven as much by hope as desperation, and that ‘to live and …
Read MoreNocturnal Kinship
Uploaded 1 December 2001 | Modified 11 January 2002 I. The Projectionist’s Window There were years when I went to the cinema almost every day and maybe even twice a day, and those were the years between ’36 and the war, the years of my adolescence. It was a time when the cinema became the world for me. A different …
Read MoreA Strange Sun: Cinema and Theatre in John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night
Uploaded 1 December 2001 [T]heatre for Cassavetes restores that vital link between the spoken word, the script and physical actions that are forever rearranged in a surprising way, ready to come apart at any moment . . . In short, a script is necessary but not sacrosanct, since it is always being rewritten by life itself. Thierry Jousse [1] The idea …
Read MoreBefore Something and After Something Else: Film Studies in the Age of Media Studies
When I first looked at the title for the symposium, my immediate reaction was: there’s a word missing! The title should be: “The Future of Film Studies in the Age of Media Studies Degrees”. This is to say, my view of the topic is very much shaped by a particular institutional context – one in which the majority of students …
Read MoreHe’s Not There: Robert Frank’s Me and My Brother
The world of which I am a part includes Julius Orlovsky. Julius is a catatonic, a silent man; he is released from a state institution in the care of his brother Peter. Sounds and images pass him and no reaction comes from him. In the course of the film he becomes like all the other people in front of my …
Read MoreOur Place in the World
1 A little while ago, I was asked by the marketing manager of the University of Minnesota Press to write about The Misfits (USA 1961). The request coincided with the publication of Famous Faces Yet Not Themselves: The Misfits and Icons of Postwar America. The press wanted to give potential readers a glimpse of the book’s content and underlying themes. …
Read MoreA Trip to the Moon
The truth of our placement, when film works as art, is a continuous sense of drawing nearer to a place we seek, with some last vital task or piece of business not yet accounted for. Any moment, perhaps, things will be sorted out, and we can finally set our bags down. But until then, let us keep ourselves in a …
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