March 2018 Update
The past couple months have been pretty hectic for me as I try to keep up with the Catching Up with Canon blog. Jury duty and getting ready for my wedding and my vacation to Italy took up quite a bit of my time. Even with everything i have to take care of, I certainly didn’t go easy on myself. I chose to explore the works of Chantal Akerman for March, and to be honest, most of her works were a slog to get through. Still, I had to appreciate the power of her images and how much she makes us want to consider unique spaces and how they are occupied. My favorites would have to be Je, Tu, Il, Elle and Saute Ma Ville. I can see the greatness of Jeanne Dielman, but I will need to see it again to let it settle into my consciousness.
Going through the 1990’s for most of March has led me to reexamine my tastes. I realize that the modern noir is probably one of my all time favorite genres with the inclusion of The Last Seduction and Stephen Frears’ The Grifters. I like how characters in noirs, even when they are facing great challenges, seem to effortlessly occupy their spaces, especially the femme fatales and how much they bend their worlds to their submission. Noirs tend to be such heavily subjective worlds in which everyone is unreliable including (probably) the narrators, and I appreciate how these two noirs found new ways to bend this perspective.
As I mentioned before, I will be taking a brief hiatus for a couple of weeks in April since I will be in Italy, but I will try to post as much new content as possible before I go. Some things to look forward to for April are:
More Canon entries - I will be going through most of the 80’s this month. While my choices for the 90’s were dominated by America, it seems that the 80’s will be dominated by Japanese cinema.
More trivia quizzes - I haven’t run out quite yet!
New Theme - I will be exploring works about indigenous peoples, an area of cinema I know shamefully little about.
The return of short film Wednesdays - For April, I will be writing about K-pop music videos. As absurd or trivial as that might seem, K-pop is home to some of the most innovative and freshest talent in the world currently and some truly fascinating artistic visions have risen from the Hallyu wave.
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