|Andrew Neill| The lights are out except for the TV. Outside of its pulsing glow, the bedroom is painted with deep blue shadows, which extend through the window, out onto the snowy front yard, across the icy street, a few blocks of civilization, and then miles and miles… Continue reading
|Chelli Riddough| When my ex-boyfriend Chris and I were splitting up, we had a breakup photo shoot. Our friend Zoey came over and took a series of photographs of us in the living room: hugging, holding the cat, sitting side by side. At the time, my close friends… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| The “ooh, a project!” to “omg this is a huuuuge project” pipeline is real. In less than a week, my ambient post-rock band PRGRPHS will be performing our first live score for a silent film at the Trylon—Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1930 agitprop Rorschach test Earth… Continue reading
|Josh Carson| There is a seasonal debate borne directly out of and aged exactly alongside the internet. They even share the same lifecycles: At first it was wildly amusing. Next came innocuously controversial. Then it started to get annoying as too many people… Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| In the hierarchy of entertainment juggling is somewhere between miming and magic outranking puppet shows but only slightly less compelling than street buskers (depending on what the busker is playing, of course). In case you’re wondering how low the bar… Continue reading
|Lucile Hanson| “How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava?” That quote is what opens up the description on the… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| The Keep was a tough sell for me, a Michael Mann fan who fell in love with him through Heat and Thief—on my first watch, I was almost offended by the supernatural plot (I’m fine with the paranormal on film, but keep it out of my Michael Mann features). Of course… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| The early 70s were, in many ways, rife with watershed moments in Black history: Charles Gordone became the first Black playwright to win a Pulitzer prize, Rep. Shirley Chisolm helped form the Congressional Black Caucus, and Thomas Bradley became the first Black mayor… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| If you’re going to do something really stupid, it’s not a bad idea to be beautiful. Maybe that’s how Val Kilmer ended up in Top Secret! (1984), which is both his film debut and a spoof of spy stories, resistance thrillers, and, for some reason, Elvis Presley. Top Secret!… Continue reading
|Dylan Hawthorn| The concept of melodrama has a bad reputation. If I described my sister’s behavior during a conflict as melodramatic, I am suggesting that her reaction is over-the-top and should be dismissed. Furthermore, there’s a reason my brain jumped to citing a… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| When I found out that no one had claimed to write something for the Trylon’s upcoming screening of 1984 Canuxploitation dance-ercise flick Heavenly Bodies, I felt like Charlie getting the golden ticket to the chocolate factory. What did I do to deserve this? I’d thank… Continue reading
|Malcolm Cooke| Werner Herzog has one thing to say to the proponents of Cinéma Vérité: “‘Happy New Year, losers.’”1 Herzog has always had beef with the idea of documentary as from the perspective of a fly on the wall, a genre of detached and objective reporting of facts. “That… Continue reading
|Dan McCabe| In 1999, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog came to the Walker Art Center for an on-stage interview with the late film critic Roger Ebert. During the interview, Herzog made his “Minnesota Declaration”—a twelve-point denunciation of Cinema Verité, a style of documentary… Continue reading
|Ed Dykhuizen| Female directors were commonplace, even at times dominant, in early film history. Alice Guy-Blaché directed more than 450 short films starting in 1896. Many scholars credit her with the first movie that had a narrative. In these earliest years, small companies… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| When I began this process, I did not know how personal writing about Donnie Darko would feel. It was never one of my favorite films. I was introduced to the film by my freshman roommates alongside a rolling festival of late 90s/early aughts male angst… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| This essay contains spoilers about Donnie Darko. The night I’m writing this is the evening of July third. Five years ago, somewhere between this time that evening and the morning of the fourth, my grandfather Jim passed away. I don’t like fireworks anymore. love will tear us apart… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| When we first started dating, my wife worked at a puzzle room in St. Paul, MN. One of the many perks of such a venture is that I got to play-test rooms occasionally. One such room was heavily influenced by a certain wizarding world created by She-Who-Must-Not-… Continue reading
|Brad Bellatti| For the better part of 15 years, the above image of Chaplin has bothered me. No matter how many times I watch this sequence, the finale of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) shakes me up. I’ve tried many times to find the right words to express this sentiment… Continue reading
|Matthew Christensen| My husband Luka and I have divergent tastes in movies. If I am sitting in the living room watching an old Hollywood musical or a period piece, he takes one look at the television, announces in a mix of Turkish and English, “Tamam. I will be in bed reading a book. Hadi… Continue reading
|Ben Jarman| My mom is back with her take on another film that would normally disinterest her: Godzilla vs. Gigan. My mom never watched Godzilla films with me when I was a kid, but she never stopped me from watching or pretending I was a giant creature in my backyard. A giant to her is… Continue reading
| 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
| Ben Tuthill | The Physical Education department at St. Paul Central made the inspired decision in the mid-2000s to screen Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream as the capstone to the anti-drug unit of sophomore-year health class. We needed… Continue reading
|Anjali Moore| Since I have always held a compulsive devotion to 1970s media and coming-of-age films, I ventured to the cinema to see Licorice Pizza with relatively high hopes when it was first released in 2021. I felt like Licorice Pizza might pierce my general disaffection for PTA… Continue reading
|Dan McCabe| For better or worse, the Western is the quintessential American myth from its beginnings with The Great Train Robbery (1903) through the films of John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood. During the Western’s heyday in the first half of the 1900s, the nineteenth… Continue reading
|Malcolm Cooke| Steven Larsen and Peter Bruhn met through their mailman. An avid sports fan, he assumed that two men hailing from Wisconsin must be Packers fans and encouraged them to meet. But when they finally got together to watch… Continue reading
|Olivia Fredrickson| The cinema of Maya Deren without a doubt captures not only the intrinsic reflections of her consistently shifting identity as a woman and artist, but also the labyrinthic inner workings of the self and psyche. Both of these crucial elements of her cinema and identity… Continue reading
|Andy Strudevant| The depth of annoyance that a lot of movie people felt about this subject is a little harder to parse from a quarter-century later, because I think movie people are supposed to be a little bit more broad-minded and populist these days. But man, it’s worth remembering… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| On Dangerous Ground (1951) might appear at first to be one of the more unbearably melodramatic film noirs ever produced. Its ending, or really the ending of the ending—the film’s final scene—threatens especially to pull all that has preceded it down into the depths of pure… Continue reading
|Steve Rybin| The Trylon’s “Ozu in Color” series presents four of Yasujirō Ozu’s color films made near the end of the director’s career (1958 to 1963). These films cover what is for Ozu familiar narrative ground: fathers and mothers give away daughters to marriage; generational conflicts pit… Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| The first movie I saw at Trylon in the spring of 2019 was John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet (1984). The film follows a protagonist known only as “The Brother” (Joe Morton), an extraterrestrial who crash-lands in Harlem, New York City… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| As a child, it would’ve been hard to fathom that going to the movies would one day be as esoteric as spending a night at the opera. But some time in the past five years, I realized that spending much of my free time on film had suddenly cast me as an eccentric clinger-on to… Continue reading
|J.R Jones| Don Hertzfeldt’s characters have always struggled for words. In the opening scene of his hourlong animation It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), the everyman protagonist, Bill, recognizes someone walking toward him on the street and prepares a greeting. But when they pass… Continue reading
|Zach Staads| I first saw Don Hertzfeldt’s Everything Will Be OK in my friend’s living room, a cavernous Victorian echo chamber carved from oak and smothered in pink-beige plaster, where we watched on a chunky, green Dell laptop from 2006. Those 17 minutes changed my life. Continue reading
|Matthew Christensen| As a kid, we used to play a game called “Statue Maker.” The statue maker would swing two or three kids about; they had to hold the pose they landed in and come up with some character to portray. Other children would play customers, guided about by the statue… Continue reading
|Natalie Marlin| In the dawning hours of the morning, a grocer (Bengal) wakes to the still-blue fading night. The framing is methodical, delicate, but not at all static. The grocer Haruzo’s body stirs from bed, but the camera lingers on his wife Michi (Masako Motai) stirring and rolling… Continue reading
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| Unlike coconuts, mangoes, apples, cherimoyas, plantains, and pineapples, everyone knows what to do with a watermelon. Cut and enjoy. They grow in the vast majority of the world from Sweden to Japan, USA to Chile, China to Israel. Perhaps, because of this, watermelons … Continue reading
|Brogan Earney| There’s a lot to admire about The Searchers; the beautiful landscapes, the exhilarating action scenes, the complex characters. It’s all enough to have this film continuously mentioned as one of the greatest ever made, as it should be. The first time I saw the film was just… Continue reading
|Bob Aulert| In 1966, Rock Hudson had been a movie star since the early 1950s—by his mere presence, he could generate the financial support to get a movie made AND then get people to buy tickets to see it. John Frankenheimer had parlayed solid network TV jobs like Playhouse 90… Continue reading
|Hannah Baxter| The Watermelon Woman (1996) is a movie about making a movie about movies—the very definition of meta. The main character, Cheryl, played by writer-director Cheryl Dunye, is steeped in moving pictures. She supports herself videotaping weddings and working… Continue reading
|Jake Rudegeair| “Coming of age” always struck me as a flat phrase for something so bumpy, so relentless. It doesn’t really illustrate that slow erosion of our bodies and souls as we’re worn down by the slings and arrows of experience, cruelly and carelessly reformed over and over… Continue reading
