LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH

Jessica demonstrates horror’s efficacy at depicting personal and societal alienation. It is a monograph of connecting subjective turmoil to its secular source; an elegy of 60s counterculture in its decline; a faded decal on a black hearse. 

REPULSION

Many everyday horrors can be attributed to life in London. Air quality is poor. People push and shove their way through the miserable circus of public transport. Rain causes leaks and floods in Victorian flats. Strangers appear at every corner, the threat of violence thick in the air. 

THE BIRTH OF A FLOWER

This is a cinema of gentleness and beauty; of pure experimentation without irreverence or self-obsession. This is a film teeming with nascent possibility; a playful exhibition of new ways of seeing and understanding the world.

GOOD MORNING

The short explores the mystery of the dream state, not simply as a state of mind but a physical realm the body is tied to during slumber. To be see-through is to pass time without effect, to blend into one’s environment.

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES

If there is any common thread between the disparate parts of the film, it’s that the boundaries of the human body and soul are in flux; characters might easily slip into the non-human domain through seduction by the forces of nature, whether conscious or unconscious. 

THE WOMAN WITH TWO HEADS

Behind a girl and her rolling hoop, a shadow hangs against a sheet, as if delicately pinned by a psychic substance. Indeed, shadows are spirited. They shape-shift, they follow, they cling; they’re parasitic.

BIG BANG BIG BOOM

The video starts in primordial blackness. Atomic compounds form simple bodies, which soon grow and contort, taking on new properties as they adapt to their environments. In one sequence, a chalk-drawn crab merges with a bucket as it chases a plastic bag; in another, a deflated ball drags itself across a beach with a pair of gloves.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

Bodies are swathed in silk and tulle; stood before a lighthouse at sunset or bouquets of flowers, drifting beneath candlelight, waltzing through enfiladed drawing rooms amongst paintings and whispers and regrets. 

JE TU IL ELLE

While it may be distressing to some, it can feel like home to others: Akerman displays with radical transparency how it may feel to be in conflict with the search for human connection and the fear of rejection from the world outside. 

THE VOICE OF THE SLASHER

For Kirk, Pam, and Franklin—like the middle-of-the-road American—to find the grotesque underside of the country (i.e. the deep corruption that upholds the country’s normative ideologies), one must first believe in the beauty of it. In other words, one can only have a loss of faith if one ever had faith in the thing to begin with.

SISYPHUS

This image – of a man suspended in endless labour, with no hope for relief – has resonated with many throughout history; one might find parallels in agricultural cycles, relentless working schedules, and even celestial movements.