Articles
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Grounding expressionism
Every time I grab a Tony Scott’s film from my shelves and put it on is a reminder of how much I miss him. Periodically revisiting their favourite directors is something all film lovers do, of course. When the director is dead, and his or her passing happens to be recent, it’s almost as if a close friend is gone. I do miss Charlie Chaplin, but he was a like a long gone grand-grandfather. A friend is a different thing altogether.
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Questioning the future
A work of art is ever-changing. It never ceases to approach you in unexpected ways and, even when you know what is coming, a work of art knows that it can surprise your mental agility in an instant. It’s as living as the artist, and just as the artist explores different directions, a work of art moves and challenges you constantly. If it doesn’t move or it stops fighting, then there is little art involved in it.
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What Is Democracy?
It would take you probably about five minutes to figure out how poor my knowledge of politics and philosophy is. In terms of politics, I know what is happening in my country and in the rest of the world thanks to RSS feeds that track a little selection of online newspapers among other things, but that’s it. And when it comes to philosophy, I only have a couple of books from Friedrich Nietzsche and Peter Singer to display.
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Breaking the balance
M. Night Shyamalan is a peculiar subject in contemporary cinema. He helms his films most of the times, controlling writing, direction, and production, while often relying on the help of recurring collaborators. He devised his own recognizable style, and he has been showing interests in different genres with developing fascination for the psychological and the spiritual.
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Reducing a book and enlarging TV
No film has ever had a more traumatizing impact on me than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I remember fondly the day I found a lousy Italian DVD, because it felt like a smart and lucky move. Two cents for the forbidden fruit. The 14” CRT television in my bedroom could not contain the power coming from that rotten and perverse images.