|Sophie Durbin| Eager to celebrate Bleak Week, my favorite national holiday, I asked humbly to write about Sátántangó. My intentions were noble. I wanted to do a “Slow Looking” analysis in which I muse about the benefits of immersing oneself in the world of a film over many… Continue reading
|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
|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
|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
|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
| Dan McCabe | “I thought it was something I could play. A few people could have done it, but it was a relatively castable role for me. I had made my theater bones playing these types of street characters… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| “It’s Bleak” | The 1970 Peter Boyle film Joe is not part of our Bleak Week programming—though you’d be forgiven if you thought it was. Joe, which we programmed to kick off our Cantankerous Peter Boyle series, follows a wealthy advertising executive (Dennis Patrick) Continue reading
| Jackson Stern | Of all the corruption, illnesses, and injustices affecting the world today (you could count them on fifteen hands), few are as elusive as what many refer to as the “male loneliness epidemic.” We seem to discuss this very real sickness as if… 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
| 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
| Doug Carmody | Threads opens to a world on the brink. But despite a sky disrupted by thundering jet planes and a radio warning of escalating tensions between NATO and Iran, the opening scene shows two young lovers, Ruth and Jimmy, trying to have a nice time on a date. The next scene… Continue reading
