Film remains open
Alain Robbe-Grillet on Michelangelo Antonioni’s aesthetic in L’Avventura and Blowup (via).
Three days in the life
Houellebecq on The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq.
The flâneur on film
Rob Stone on Richard Linklater and the dérive in cinema.
The flâneur’s accumulation of experiences and influences often results in an indistinct outcast figure, one who walks to a different rhythm, defined and maintained by an absence of clear origins and a lack of explicit direction. Consequently, the flâneur can be disruptive where a sense of rootlessness and rejection of settlement renders the figure as threatening Other.
Boredom in real time
n+1 on experimental film, Jeanne Dielman.
Chantal Akerman has given countless interviews. In most of these, even the most recent ones, she is still asked about Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, her canonical 1975 film that she made when she was only 25. Her responses have shifted over the course of decades, and at times you can sense her irritation at the continual fascination with her youth; in a 2010 interview, she snapped back to a question about watching Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, long cited as a life-changing experience for Akerman: “Oh, I have said that a hundred times. Forget about it. You know all about that. I have told that story one million times.”