Category: BLEAK WEEK

Testament: Motherhood & the Bomb in 1980s Suburbia

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An old television set’s screen is black, with the word “ALERT” going across it in big white capital letters. To the left and running behind it is the bottom of a white window sill with white curtains with daylight behind them. Below this, to the slide and slightly in front of the corner of the TV is a record player, the other half of which is cut off by the frame.

|Penny Folger| Bleak Week, which began at the American Cinematheque in 2022, partially as an ironic response to the pandemic, has now spread globally and is making its triumphant return to Trylon Cinema. This time with Testament, the story of a family in a small town on the outskirts of San Francisco in the aftermath of… Continue reading

The Apocalyptic Subjectivity of Come and See

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Boy leaning against dead cow in foggy field.

|Jackson Stern| To call a film totally immersive is to imply that there isn’t almost always some sort of invisible barrier between the viewer and the images projected on the screen. Something happens in the space between the light’s reflection and the eyes of its observer that dilutes perception to the point where even the most painfully… Continue reading

Kinuyo Tanaka, Oharu, and the Written Women of Mizoguchi

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Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) laying with a somber look on her face.

|Dan Howard| Just two years before her death, Kinuyo Tanaka gave an interview for the 1975 documentary Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director. It was during this interview that Kaneto Shindō, the director, inquired about the rumor that Mizoguchi was secretly in love with her and never confessed his feelings. Tanaka, while flattered… Continue reading

Party at the Czech Death Temple, 1969 

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High angle black and white shot of a family of four outside in a park. The father and the mother are looking directly into the camera, their children (son and daughter) are looking down. They are dressed in fine clothing, suits and blazers, and there is a gated off bush behind them.

|Finn Odum| It’s 10:30 p.m. on a Tuesday.  The lights in your apartment are dimmed. There’s a migraine kicking in, and your insomnia is fighting the sedative in your medication just long enough to keep you conscious. You’re aching for the sweet release of death sleep—but you know that if you try to lay down… Continue reading

Zodiac: A Meditation on Obsession as Addiction

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Graysmith (Gyllenhaal) and Avery (Downey Jr.) sit at a desk in the San Francisco Chronicle's bullpen in Fincher's Zodiac.

|Allison Vincent| I love both David Fincher movies and movies about tracking and apprehending serial killers. I also love a good true crime doc. My Netflix recently watched is filled to the brim with multi-episode rundowns of both the most well-known offenders as well as the bizarre… Continue reading

The Tribe: Nothing New Under the (Bleak) Sun

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Film Poster for The Tribe, showing a stack of overlapping transparent B/W images of one young man, one young woman, and multiple hands making signs. All images aggregate in the middle, where the film's title appears, subtitled with "Love and Hate need no translation."

|Olga Tchepikova-Treon| As far as I’m concerned, every week at the cinema should be Bleak Week. Well, not every week, but let’s say maybe 40 out of 52 weeks of the year could easily be Bleak Week, and it would be wonderful, cathartic, exhilarating, moving, and maybe even sublime. I like Bleak Week, and bleak movies in general, for mostly… Continue reading

Leaves in the Storm: The Role of Nature in The Virgin Spring

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A black and white image of a man standing on a hill, to the right of a tall, skinny tree. Several hills are visible in the background.

| Jared Meyer | Ingmar Bergman was the first filmmaker who made me realize you can film the invisible. While first discovering my love of film and beginning my practice as a filmmaker, Bergman’s films broke open my perception of movies as entertainment, that they could be just as complex a probing… Continue reading

The Real Sequel to Mad Max: How to Explain the Apocalypse in The Road Warrior by Watching Threads

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Just after a nuclear explosion, the silhouette of a man on a bike in a tree burns in an orange blaze.

| Ben Jarman | Nobody is surprised when it happens; it’s been coming for a long time, before written history. One argument turns into conflict after conflict. Sometimes the conflicts bring us to the brink, but never over the edge. The scholars warn and the media antagonize… Continue reading

The Thin Line Between Chaotic and Lawful: Litigious Grief in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter

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A medium-long shot of Tom McCamus as Sam Burnell sitting on top of a picnic bench alongside Sarah Polley as his daughter Nicole Burnell. Sam has one leg propped up on the bench of the table, his hands resting in his lap and holding a half-eaten ice cream. He's dressed in forest green coveralls and wearing a brown leather toolbelt, staring up and to the left with an inscrutable expression on his face, his shoulder-length dark hair blowing in the wind. Nicole has both legs propped up on the same bench and is dressed in beige, white, and pink clothing, including a patterned sweater with rabbits strewn across the chest. She is mid-bite of her cone and looks amused. The brightly lit background indicates they are at a carnival at dusk.

| Chris Polley | I barely understood what a lawyer was as a teen in the 90s. I especially never thought I’d end up marrying one. The major reference points I had were all from TV and movies: I loyally watched The Practice even as ABC kept messing with its time slot… Continue reading