Alfredo Müller (1869-1939) - La Fuga (Series Of The Arlecchinate) - 1918-1920

If you could be anyone, would you choose to be yourself?

Naomi Shihab Nye, Habibi (via books-n-quotes)

Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) | dir. Shane Meadows

DoP : Danny Cohen

Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emotional range, that is dizzyingly sensual. Movies generally work you up to expect the sensual intensities, but here you may be pulled into a high without warning. Violence erupts crazily, too, the way it does in life – so unexpectedly fast that you can’t believe it, and over before you’ve been able to take it in. The whole movie has this effect; it psychs you up to accept everything it shows you. And since the story deepens as it goes along, you’re likely to be openmouthed, trying to rethink what you’ve seen. Its about American life here and now, and it doesn’t look like an American movie, or feel like one. What Scorsese has done with the experience of growing up in New York’s Little Italy has a thicker-textured rot and violence than we have ever had in any American movie, and a riper since of evil.

The picture is stylized without seeming in any way artificial; it is the only movie I’ve ever seen that achieves the effects of Expressionism without the use of distortion. “Mean Streets” never loses touch with the ordinary look of things or with common experience; rather, it puts us in closer touch with the ordinary, the common, by turning a different light on them. Every character, every sound, is rooted in those streets. The back-and-forth talk isn’t little-people empty-funny; it’s a tangle of jeering and joshing, of mutual goading and nerves getting frayed. These boys understand each other too well. No other American gangster-milieu film has had this element of personal obsession; there has never before been a gangster film in which you felt that the director himself was saying “This is my story.” We’re so affected because we know in our bones that Scorsese has walked these streets and has felt what his characters feel. He knows how crime is natural to them.

Scorsese could make poetic drama, rather than melodrama laced with decadence, out of the schlock of shabby experience because he didn’t have to “dive below the polite level, to something nearer to the common life” but had to do something much tougher- descend into himself and bring up what neither he nor anyone else could have known was there. Though he must have suspected. This is a blood thriller in the truest sense.

Pauline Kael

toska [tohs-kah]

(noun) An untranslatable, Russian word – Vladimir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” (via wordsnquotes)

Withnail and I  (1987)

... This is a film that will never be tarnished by age, and neither is it limited by repeat viewings. It is a very accessible film, despite its largely English humour, and ‘Withnail’ remains one of the best films about friendship. Certainly a one off, “Withnail and I” is a must see film that will not disappoint. 

Of Freaks and Men (1998) | dir. Alexei Balabanov

When evil triumphs, humour turns black. Glimpses of turn-of-the-century porn has an uncomfortable, humiliating look to it. Balabanov massages human nature's ugly heart. The film is so original and startling, it appears playful, when really it concerns an abuse of power that feeds off trust and decency, perverting both.

The film is shot as a pastiche of silent cinema, without Chaplin's famous fast motion. In old St Petersburg the bourgeoisie live innocent and privileged lives, while in the basement of an abandoned building tight-lipped Johan (Sergei Makovetsky), with his smirking, sinister sidekick (Victor Sukhorukov), organises nude spanking sessions

which are photographed and sold to sado-masochistic postcard collectors, when not purloined by their naughty maids.

There are moments in this deliciously subversive film when you suspect Alexei Balabanov is being satirical and those scenes of pornographers taking over the grand houses, only to corrupt them with their nasty habits, refer to organised crime's stranglehold on the Russian economy, not to mention the state of the nation.

The Method

David Castañeda & Robert Sheehan - The Umbrella Academy Red Carpet | HOLR Magazine

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) | dir. Peter Weir

DoP : Russell Boyd

Withnail & I (1987)

Paul McGann as "I" and Richard E Grant as Withnail on the steps of their Camden home