All Over Me

dir. Alex Sichel
USA, 1997

Great 90s riot grrl film

Punishment Park

dir. Peter Watkins
USA, 1971

Fantastic pseudo-documentary that has very unsettlingly eerily scarily similar arguments made for brutal punishments of dissidents that today's America of the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay seems to indulge in...

Rewatch: Blackboards

dir. Samira Makhmalbaf
Iran, 2000

Wonderful to see this again, a film that has a strange (when thought about after) mix of neo-realism and magical otherness...

Adam

dir. Max Mayer
USA, 2009

Strange film that didn't know what it wanted to be: a run-of-the-mill-Hollywood-heartwarmer or an actually decent little indie about a guy with Asperger's...

The Thorn In The Heart

dir. Michel Gondry

France, 2009

Wonderfully touching film dedicated to Michel's aunt Suzette and her career as an "avant-garde" teacher in the Cevennes in the 50s, 60s and 70s...

Little Dieter Needs To Fly

dir. Werner Herzog

France/UK/Germany, 1998

Koktobel

dirs. Boris Khlebnikov and Aleksei Popogrebski

Russia, 2003

Very much like The Return, which I liked rather more

Happy Together

dir. Wong Kar Wai

Hong Kong, 1997

Al got me this DVD for £2 years ago, when Global Video on Great Western Road was shutting down, and when I was in the initial blooms of a Wong Kar Wai obsession. Strange, then, that I hadn't gotten round to watching it til now. Perhaps it's to do with seeing a film at the CCA a while ago that used a few frames from Happy Together ran on a loop as the visual back-up for a film essay on diasporas, travelling, love, theory, literature, film and so on. It reminded me Wong Kar Wai's wonderful use of colour, and the use of that colour to create emotional states visually, of making the film be the state, rather than show it, of making film live as a feeling, I suppose.

Rewatch: Songs From The Second Floor

dir. Roy Andersson

Sweden, 2000

I remember seeing this when it came out, when I was 17. I had recently got glasses for short-sightedness, but had forgotten them on that particular evening, which meant that I watched the entirety of this film squinting - but not a full squint, a semi-squint - trying to read the subtitles. Luckily there aren't many.

From that first watch 11 years ago, all I remember really is the general aspect of apocalypse and humour, and the scene where a mountain-top of dignitaries push a gifted child off a cliff.

Watching it now, I feel more aware of it fitting in to a particularly European existential sense, maybe, or a dark/black humour, the sort that connects Bunuel and Monty Python with the grey landscapes of Scandinavian winters. It's much more explicitly political than I remember, although I do remember the large proportion of shots of middle-aged men sat pondering, in their pants and vest, on the edge of their bed, in the middle of the night, their bedside lamp on, their wife asleep.