Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.


May 2007 activity

Total Log Entries: 39

Total Comments: 13


Full Archive



8 ½ Women / UK / Netherlands / 1999

Peter Greenway’s work has a particular – and, to my mind, inimitable – quality that is simultaneously surreal and literal. The opening credits to this film, which exhibit the filmmaker’s continued obsession with numerology, display 8 ½ views of Tokyo Pachinco palaces. This occurs on top of the screenplay’s text, which describes the same. My description of this scene is precise, but the scene persists in an indescribable abstraction.

It is this, I guess, oddness that attracts me to Greenaway’s work—its emblazoned aestheticism captured in dull camera staging, or how an obsession with symmetry (or numerology) regularly overwhelms his films’ fundamental structures, narratives, and characterizations. And in all, it is contestable that Greenaway is less interested in cinema as a componential art than he is in its individual components, taking them and manipulating them into a ribald mixture both totally innovative and conventionally uncinematic.

by Rumsey Taylor | Source: IFC
31 May 2007 12:23 PM | Submit Comment


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