Writing about colour in the LRB archive by Ian Hacking, Anne Enright, John Kinsella, Alison Light, Julian Bell, David Garrioch, Emily LaBarge and Stephen Mulhall.
It has been said, with justification, that Kubrick’s films show a preoccupation with violence. Yet his interest is of a peculiarly unexcitable kind, whether the action is grinding, as in trench warfare, or sudden and concussive, as in a boxing match or a duel. He is never in it for the spectacle, he never invites the audience to share the thrill of men destroying one another: the feeling is cold, a turn-off.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Wei Shujun’s film Only the River Flows is the continuing contrast between its look and its story, between the faithful realism of the first and the elusive options . . .
Lucian Freud resembled certain film directors – Ingmar Bergman, for example – in that the lead characters in his works influenced the way the creation took shape, often guiding it into entirely . . .
Rebeca Andrade of Brazil, silver medal-winner in the all-around at consecutive Olympics, on the beam. Aweek before the start of the Paris Olympics, Shoko Miyata, the 19-year-old captain of the Japanese . . .
Iwas still half asleep when I heard the story on an early morning TV show one day in April. It was so odd I wondered later if I had dreamed it. But it was true: government authorities in Chechnya had . . .
Perhaps, then – though the thought is a grim one – we turn to Guernica with a kind of nostalgia. Suffering and horror were once this large. They were dreadful, but they had a tragic dimension.
Sinatra’s sexual charge was like his song: underplayed, tinged with unflappable cool picked up second-hand in the shady cloisters of jazz.
Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded.
As I drew, things began to change. Quite suddenly something was happening down there on the paper that I had not anticipated. I continued, I went on drawing; I pushed ahead, both intuitively and consciously. The squares began to lose their original form.
A photograph of Abbas Kiarostami in Hamid Dabashi’s book shows him crouching over a frying pan that has two eggs in it. Beside him, and like him focused on the eggs, is the original movie camera invented by Lumière.
‘Studio Vingt-Huit – high up a winding street of Montmartre, in the full blasphemy of a freezing Sunday; taxis arriving, friends greeting each other, an excitable afternoon...
The true foodie knows there is something not quite ... about a coconut kirsch roulade as a concept. It is just a bit ... just a bit Streatham. Its vowels are subtly wrong. It is probably related to a Black Forest gâteau.
When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable...
Fashion, according to Baudelaire, is a moral affair. It is, more specifically, the obligation laid upon a woman to transform herself, outwardly and visibly, into a work of art, or, at the very...
Writing about colour in the LRB archive by Ian Hacking, Anne Enright, John Kinsella, Alison Light, Julian Bell, David Garrioch, Emily LaBarge and Stephen Mulhall.
Writing about the press by Andrew O’Hagan, Ross McKibbin, Jenny Diski, James Meek, Suzanne Moore, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Alan Rusbridger, Thomas Nagel and Raymond Williams.
Michael Wood looks at how Fritz Lang uses sound in his first two sound films, M (1931) and The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933).
Nicholas Penny looks through the letters of Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, who visited England in the late 1820s.
Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...
Roni Horn’s attention here is fixed on something more indefinite than ordinary, obvious reflexivity about image-making and artifice, something that slips between images, between moments, between words...
Velázquez’s portraits give us a more penetrating understanding of the image that the Spanish monarchy wished to convey than any textual description supplied by accounts or pamphlets. The portraits reveal...
Käthe Kollwitz aimed to bend the bourgeois tradition of printmaking to her proletarian content, not to break with it. ‘Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways,’ she once remarked. ‘But...
Last year I narrated Pelé’s My Autobiography – yes, I am the queer voice of the greatest footballer of the 20th century. This presented the challenge of voicing problematic and dated views, especially...
There has been an element of ‘infatuation-driven hyperbole’ in almost everything that has been said and written about Pauline Boty. In her lifetime her physical presence was always part of her reputation....
Again and again, Kauffman portrays herself holding a stylus and portfolio, the symbols not of painting but of drawing, of the intellectual and imaginative efforts that precede the messy work of the brush.
Another title for The Dead Don’t Hurt could be ‘Western Promises’, but this movie is a very late contribution to the genre. Only the worst promises are kept. The familiar nostalgia for loneliness...
The nightingale’s song is punctuated by rich, almost painful pauses. In the silence, one imagines the bird has come to the end of a verse and is considering, with the ease and confidence of a seasoned...
The Village Voice went to press with an invitation to its readers to become its contributors. Forget about being professional writers or journalists, the editors announced. Send us what you find interesting....
In Surrealism’s first decade ‘transgression’ was the watchword: Breton advocated it, and Bataille both practised and theorised it. There was a residual bourgeois order with more or less clear lines...
When do we dig up the dead, and how? Can they be robbed? What if their deadness is final, and that’s all we need to know, or can know?
Jan Lievens was not one for wild expression or extreme physiognomy; his tronies summon a striking human presence. He could render human heads as unforgettable apparitions.
Maldoror honoured independence struggles in Africa and other parts of the world throughout her life. But she wouldn’t set aside her values as a filmmaker in the name of a cause: ways of seeing had to...
Surrey comes from a different time. It is, to appropriate Surreyspeak, forever a wholly unconvincing approximation of yore (1450-1600). It comes from a different place, too: so lavishly heathered, gorsed,...
We think we remember works of art rather well; and probably assume that the greater the work of art, and the more powerfully it strikes us, the more accurate our mental image of it must be. But memory...
One way of refusing to see the difference between making a movie and talking about one is to remember that films often talk, literally and obliquely, about film.
‘The artist,’ Jacques Lacan wrote, ‘always precedes [the analyst].’ Great works of art had already illuminated even the most deeply hidden features of the phenomena he sought to describe.
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