I’ve been extremely busy lately, to the point where any sort of internalized consideration of events or even just mere reflection has been relegated to those moments when I’m walking to or from somewhere, or perhaps between doing various tasks at one or the other day-job; all of this to say, of course, that this sort of thought itself has become interstitial. To a certain extent this is fine; it’s certainly easier when you’re trying […]
Author: M Kitchell
The thing is, when something seems infinitely unattainable, the energy poured into the search is heightened. When you start getting closer to what it is that you’re looking for, when you can feel proximity, you slow down, lessen intensity. But that pushes the goal further away. How to maintain that sense of importance as you’re closing in? That excitement, that energy?
On Research As Practice
In another jag of (finally) finding myself inspired by film; was in a bit of a dry spell for a while. Picked back up Paul Sharits’s issue of FILM CULTURE which I’ve had a photocopy of for years but never read in its entirety. I finally digitized it which is making it easy to read. An article by Sharits that I expected to be somewhat of a drag ended up being quite inspiring, “A CINEMATICS […]
Material Evidence from the Outside
A friend of mine recently commented, regarding a grip of 12 inches he was posting photos of on Instagram, that he loves the cover art for Italo Disco singles because there’s something slightly off about them, something that reminds him of the bizarre record stores that pop up in his dream, with titles and covers impossibly absent from the real world. As someone with a consistently over-active dream life, there’s something so necessarily true about […]
Agatha and the Limitless Reading (Marguerite Duras, 1981)
“You’re making it up.” “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Going from the inside out: L’Homme Atlantique, a perfect film1, as microcosm of Agatha et les lectures illimitées, a near-perfect film, as microcosm of Agatha, the bare-bones structure, a theatre script by Duras. There’s always a back and forth. But, the skeleton of the piece is not just the theatre script, but the obfuscation of biographical elements, whether or not those elements are “true […]
The Castle of Communion (Bernard Noël, 1969)
ONCE AGAIN I’M FALLING. ONCE AGAIN IT’S NIGHT. During an interview in EXIT 10/11 (Winter 1976/77), translated by Glenda George in Spectacular Diseases No. 5, Bernard Noël articulates that the job of criticism “should be explaining the functioning, the necessary [of the work].” This is perhaps the most sound and succinct description of what criticism should do that I’ve encountered (at least as a description that I agree with), and as such I’ve internalized it, […]