Category: Writing
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Whiplash (2014)
Critics, of all people, are certainly entitled to their opinion. And Richard Brody is by no means an unqualified critic. What Brody’s done here, though, is fundamentally misunderstand the thrust of the film he’s critiquing. It’s a trap that a great many critics fall into: thinking the film is about one thing, when it’s actually about something else, or a bunch of other things.
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Speed and politics
Cinema is movement. Movement is change. Change is politics — politics regulates change. Movement in the frame is thus political. The addition of speed amplifies the political impetus of cinema. Movement is cinema. * * * [It’s okay, I haven’t lost it. These are perfunctory scribblings for upcoming research, that I thought were strangely poetic. Rough […]
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Writing
I haven’t written for a very long time. That seems a strange thing to say, given that I bill myself as a ‘writer, producer, and researcher’. But it’s true. In terms of actually setting mind to page without the baggage of scholarly rigour, it’s been an age. Given I now work for an institution that […]
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Re-framing the frame
‘Framing is a position of thinking.’ – Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy, p. 125. As previously alluded to, I’m in the very strange process of having to think through my own comprehension of the cinematic medium. In a way, I’m taking baby steps towards my own theory of film. I’ll be taking these initial explorations to a couple […]
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7 February 2010
Thoughts from the elder Moleskine: ‘When I was a child, I thought as a child acted as a child, spoke as a child… but when I became a man, I turned my back on childish things.’ [1 Corinthians 13:11] The church expects that every person should grow up. Why? There is no harm, no danger, […]
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A Thursday
She’s laughing at an in-joke with herself about everyone on board; She’s engrossed in her book; He has his headphones in, openly staring at each commuter in turn; All the other men are suited, reading their papers or fumbling with technology that was crafted much later than their fingers stopped working; There is an amicably […]
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On Snowpiercer
In a lot of ways, Snowpiercer is a mere shadow of films like The Road or I Am Legend, in the sense that humanity’s last remnants must struggle to survive after some great global calamity. However, it’s also about the Arab Spring. Maybe. Or about the Occupy movement. But, again, it’s not. It’s a film about humanity, or is it?
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Today I wrote a letter
It’s been a very long time since I sat down to write a letter. On paper. Without the aid of a spell-check, or the need to select a font, or to find and insert an email, or remember to attach an attachment. But today, I did.
Daniel Binns 