Desks
Media
Illusions perdues, 2019: “Dolce Fine Giornata” by Jacek Borcuch
No sooner does “Dolce Fine Giornata” plant you in an utterly rich, tawny Tuscan landscape than you realize that you’ve been here before—many times. Throughout its duration, the film’s landscape remains the […]
Imaginary Resilience: Christian Petzold’s “Transit”
Christian Petzold’s current “Transit” is a stunning recreation of what the World War II refugee scene must have been like, particularly as, one by one, the “lines of flight” out of precarious […]
Lee Chang Dong’s “Barn Burning” (2018): Adaptation in Full Torque
Lee Chang Dong’s masterpiece, “Burning” (2018), currently winding its way along the screens of art cinema, is a guided tour through the contemporary Korean economy and its cultural surround. All the more […]
How Trump’s Followers Construct Alt-Truth from Lies, Part 2: Daemonic Invention
Commentators describe Trump as a leader who thinks he is telling the truth but who in fact lies constantly to followers, followers who know he lies but believe he does so intentionally […]
How Trump’s Followers Construct Alt-Truth from Lies, Part 1: A Deep Story for Shallow Deception
I first began to think about this topic early in the 2016 presidential campaign. At that time, no one took Donald Trump’s run for office seriously. Most commentators didn’t think even Trump […]
How We Look: #MeToo at the Movies, 2
The premise of Claire Denis’s recent “Let the Sunshine In” (Un beau soleil intérieur) may be a bit unconventional; but then in 2018, it is not the least bit difficult to entertain […]
#Me Too at the Movies: Précis
And no more turn aside and brood Upon love’s bitter mystery William Butler Yeats One of the surprising, but in the end most consequential casualties of the #MeToo movement may well be […]
Welcome to the Great Dismissal! Part 2
The question, in a nutshell, faced by New York Times opinion writers of remarkable diversity at the midterm reboot runs as follows: how do the Democrats retrofit their arguments such that they […]
Welcome to the Great Dismissal!
We live in an age when feedback loops—among which number critique—have reached so rapid a rate of acceleration that they coincide with and to some degree even anticipate the events ostensibly precipitating […]
A Triumph for the Dangerous Profession: New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2016
In the August 14, 2016 edition of its Magazine, devoted to the theme of “Fractured Lands,” the New York Times achieved new depth and scope in the coverage of perhaps the signal […]
“Son of Saul”: Holocaust 2015
With the inconceivable role played by the German concentration camp Sonderkommando as its premise, this current feature, winner of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’or, leads us squarely into the contemporary […]
Jafar Panahi’s “Taxi”: Journey to the End of a Regime
Jafar Panahi’s current “Taxi” begins and ends with exquisitely composed still-shots. The first is a street-scene in contemporary Teheran. This is a thoroughly up-to-date, bustling city. We face a busy intersection. There […]
Precarity, Bulgarian Style: Grozeva & Valchanov’s “The Lesson” (“Urok”–2014)
It’s completely in keeping with her character that Nadezhde Daskalova (Margita Gosheva) responds to a wanton act of petty thievery in her middle-school English class with repugnance and moral outrage. She is […]
Unpacking my Kindle™
The packaging is unassuming—a low black box with a single beveled facet. But the promise encoded in the tablet inside is prodigious! Up to 1100 books stored and on demand in the […]
Aleksei Balabanov, “The Castle” (1994): MacKay/Sussman Double-Feature
The Castle (Zamok, 1994) Cast Nikolai Stotsky – K., the surveyor Svetlana Pismichenko – Frieda (dubbed by Anzhelika Nevolina) Viktor Sukhorukov – Surveyor’s assistant Anvar Libabov – Surveyor’s assistant Igor Shibanov – […]
The Cinema of Deliberation: Ceylan’s “Winter Sleep”
Like all great works of cinema, the current feature, “Winter Sleep,” by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (screenplay with Ebru Ceylan), is both an open sesame to a very local ecology, Cappadocio, that through […]
Antigone in Post-War Poland
“Ida” is an odd amalgam. Set in 1962, it brings together two female characters who could not be more incongruous as they negotiate a somber Polish landscape in their common effort to […]
“La Grande Bellezza”: “. . . a tattered life”
“La Grande Bellezza,” a current first-run Roman extravaganza by Paolo Sorrentino, is beautifully filmed, assembled, paced and choreographed. A loose narrative and rhizome of characters centering on journalist and high-society icon Jep […]
Call/Appel/征集/Ruf—for Submissions
Feedback is a weblog publication of Open Humanities Press, a community of critics dedicated to writing at the generative interfaces between established disciplinary, institutional, and social territories and protocols. The […]
About Feedback
Feedback is a weblog publication of the critical theory community. It is the current expression of a network of readers, scholars, and critics that has dedicated itself for some decades already to […]
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