really wish a gay guy with a brain would get a tenth of Ryan Murphy’s budget so there would be a miniseries about German leftcels in Los Angeles in the 40s: Brecht, Adorno, Horkheimer, others I forget, and Fritz Lang… though he wasn’t really a communist, or at least that’s what he told Peter Bogdanovich. they did this six-day interview, ext. Lang’s house, summer 1965. (I learned this from an essay in a reader edited by Joan Copjec called Shades…

this film feels chemically engineered to my taste. the fantasy of being an orphan. repressed lesbian desire. diva behaviour. shades of Veronika Voss, obviously, and Irma Vep. I even liked the long digressions into poetic cinema, which is soooo hit (Tarkovsky) or miss (Parajanov) for me. eroticism of the peephole, terror of night. ‘will I too disappear?’

very elegantly scripted, though certain double entendres are lost by translating idiomatically vs literally. like when Marion Cotillard says the important line ‘je…

I read an interview with Josh Safdie where he talked about his compulsion to shoot inches from the actors’ faces, making it sound like a daring, even dangerous, exercise in directorial power. it is a technique. he learned it from Sean Price Williams on the set of Good Time, although you have to go back to articles published in 2017 to find that out, because he won’t admit it now. now he’s like, ‘this one scene about auschwitz in my…