Last week was a less straightforward and conventional haunted house film, with its focus on the essential erasure or subsumption of the domestic into the service industry economy. I wanted to keep that theme going with this week's entry, Oliver Assayas’s Personal Shopper. The story follows Maureen Cartwright, played by Kristen Stewart, who works as … Continue reading The Haunted House on Film Part Four
The last piece in the series (read it here, why not?) covered something of a classic so for this installement it seems appropriate to go for a more contemporary director who is clearly indebted to the form and aesthetics of older horror film. Who better than Ti West? However, I have to start with something … Continue reading The Haunted House on Film Part Three
After starting last week with the piece on Fulci, I thought I would turn to another film that takes even heavier inspiration from Henry James’s novella, “The Turn of the Screw.” The Innocents, directed by arguably the most literary of British film directors, Jack Clayton, is utterly peerless. It is formally and thematically bold in … Continue reading The Haunted House on Film Part Two
The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all the previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this: It was essentially a working class government, the … Continue reading The Democratic Modernism of Peter Watkins
For FRJ. Fredric Jameson is dead and it feels like the world has moved on its axis, a center of gravity has shifted. It is almost impossible to give a full and fair summation of Jameson’s achievements - as an intellectual, writer and philosopher he can only be thought of in plural, as many Jamesons. … Continue reading Thought To The Second Power
From a situation in which nothing is possible, suddenly anything is possible againMark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative Today marks the publication of my new book, A Primer on Utopian Philosophy: An Introduction to the Work of Ernst Bloch, out with Zer0 Books. The book -- more of a pamphlet really -- is … Continue reading Feeling Bloched
Some Notes on 2666 And after it there came so long a train Of people, that I ne’er would have believed That ever Death so many had undone. Over on Twitter, Erik Hane asked why everyone seems to be reading Bolano’s final novel, 2666, and this seemed like a good chance to try and offer … Continue reading 2666 Again
How often we ask for genuine experience when all we really want is emotion. Over on Twitter, there was some discussion on the role of Catholicism in horror, and whether or not there is such a thing as Protestant horror. Catholicism, with it's sacrements, rites of exorcism and coherent iconography offer a compelling cinematic language. … Continue reading Towards A Theory of Protestant Horror
Over on twitter the other day Nate Holdren asked that one of “the smart literary marxists should write as simple of a book as they can for the rest of us about what we should think of when we watch cop shows or read crime books.” Happily there are quite a lot of smart literary … Continue reading Case Notes on Blochian Detection
Capitalism A Horror Story will be published in July of this year. Thinking back, I think I can spot the very first seeds of the book in my mind as far back as around 2015 when, as a lonely and somewhat intellectually insecure Ph.D. student (how little has changed) I stumbled across China Mieville's talk … Continue reading And Next?
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