Pendant paintings are companion paintings that should hang on a wall together. Two of my favorite are of a married couple by Frans Halls, whose separate treatments might seem sexist at first sight [Fig. 1-2].

She is demure, highly finished, hemmed in by a fashionable ruff and bonnet, perhaps on the...

In Maggie Gyllenhaal's 2021 adaptation of Elena Ferrante's 'The Lost Daughter,' the last sentence of the book ("I am dead, but I'm fine") changes as Leda says, "I'm alive." By changing the death that Leda's experience motherhood entails, Gyllenhaal creates her own Leda, a woman who is different from that in the Ferrante's text.

Traoré’s 2017 film reminds us that the border itself is a problematic institution. Even in its most stripped-down form, a border exists for the exercise of power against those populations whose movements it controls. Who crosses—and at what cost—depends on lines of race, class, and gender. 

In his final film, the late Iranian director pushes the boundary between photography and film to its limit by breaking down the distinction between moment and duration. This reimagination of form would never have been possible without Kiarostami’s openness to digital techniques.

A Finnish film about the inhumanity and pervasive danger of a system that functions to deny asylum and force deportation, even if that film is warm-hearted, should also be deeply unsettling to US viewers in 2018.

Who's got rhythm?  An American in Paris and the gritty reboot as epistemology of the closet.

Stories of voyage are also stories of loss; this is why the Old English poem The Seafarer feels elegiac. In a column for The Nation, Joshua Clover considers (through allusions to The Seafarer) what kinds of losses the current crop of voyage movies are marking.

Nauman walks the walk. Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (1968) does the work of envisioning Watt’s “way of advancing” for you.  I have cast Beckett’s description of Watt’s walk as creating a series of imperatives for the reader: you have to envision Watt’s “way of advancing,” then you have to edit that vision to account for unbending knees and feet, then again for position of head and arms. But really, it’s your prerogative (cue Bobby Brown).

Where to go to start thinking about these questions?

Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change (1935): “[Men] build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss" (272). What was behind the distinctive style of loquaciousness which was once so popular for actors — and most strikingly female ones — in the Hollywood comedies of the 1930s?