Succeeds with surprisingly economic ease in showing that separation itself does not bring clarity, and that rather, by establishing Hossein's relationship with Seyrig as that of an obsessive desire, it can instead abstract vision. Because, in seeing Seyrig as an object of desire through Hossein, the film must also show how that desire impacts the space that envelops her (and that which is left in her absence). In doing this, Duras is able to use this relationship as something integral…

"What is especially bleak about so many of these new filmmakers is that they believe this academic culture to encapsulate the cinema in its entirety. Straub-Huillet are cited as influences upon “landscape films” that reduce other films to a pile of pretty images— it does not matter that everything that is done with landscape in Fortini/Cani is antithetical to this, because to these Koganadites, and those who produce these films posturing at the avant-garde, the work of Straub-Huillet (along with…

"There is no scene of sadism when Ford films the war, never the slightest stroke of complacency" - Jean Marie Straub
When Straub calls ford "objective," he is not saying that Ford shows things distanced from perspective; rather, it is that Ford deals exactly with, perspective, and within perspective (which is what is materialized in his films), he shows things "as they actually are." If Ford shows the romanticized postbellum south of the Cobb stories, he also shows a community…