My critical writing moves fluidly between the moving image, visual arts and literature. Lyssaria now also features a regular roundup of essays I’ve published beyond this site on these various art forms.

Here is the roundup of my critical essays published in January & February, 2021, and where to find them:

Bruno Dunley at Galeria Nara Roesler, Artforum

With its pictorial mischief and propositional ungainliness, and the constant stress test of human perception’s ability to parse out figuration from abstraction, Dunley’s project seems particularly apt for expressing life’s sensory entanglements.

Antônio Henrique Amaral, Artforum

The protean Brazilian artist Antônio Henrique Amaral (1935–2015) didn’t identify with any movement, though critics often tie him to neo-Cubism and Surrealism, with forays into Pop.

Sisterhood of Horror: Genre Cinema by Women at the Sundance Film Festival, NotebookMUBI

These films center not on revenge (against men) alone, but rather on complex relationships amongst women, revealing the complexity of women’s responses when solidarizing with each other’s vulnerability, particularly guilt, when it comes to having failed to come to the other’s rescue. In this sense, what emerges is a much broader sense of trauma, as a phenomenon that’s systemic, with rippling intermediary effects, rather than concentrated and singular.

A Virtual Sundance Brings Movies About Isolation and Mediated Realities, Hyperallergic

Many other titles at the festival delve further into themes of mediated reality and simulation. Natalia Almada’s documentary Users poses a similar question to The Pink Cloud about simulation versus embodied experience.

Review of Itonje Soimer Guttormsen’s Gritt, International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) roundup, Sight & Sound Magazine

The late British art critic Kenneth Clark once wrote that to be a great artist meant carrying through on a singular idea. In a sense, this is the central dilemma at the heart of Gritt, a brainy, emotionally enthralling drama by the Norwegian director Itonje Soimer Guttormsen.

Review of Prano Bailey-Bond’s CensorSight & Sound Magazine

Bailey-Bond’s premise smartly exploits contemporary viewers’ conundrum. There’s no longer official censorship, not the Enid kind, but the movie industry continues to be plagued by sexual abuse allegations, and the larger question of violence onscreen, particularly against women, remains urgent as ever.

Review of the social satire, Dead Pigs, Sight & Sound Magazine

Such vision of sharp techno-social cleavage harks back to the films of the Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke; but where Jia casts a mostly critical eye on China’s vertiginous global ascent, Yan mediates social critique with buoyancy.

 

For more reviews from the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) also see the essays published directly on Lyssaria:

Ripples of Girl Anger

Taking Risks: First Look at the IFFR Tiger Competition

 

 

 

 

More News
  • 04 10 2018
  • 0
Brazil has had a presence in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual showcase of hybrid and formally ambitious nonfiction cinema, the Art of the...
  • 04 26 2018
  • 0
This past April at the Courtisane Film Festival in Ghent, Belgium, an essential program of women avant-garde artists, curated by New York based filmmaker and...
  • 06 8 2018
  • 0
QUIERÓS: “We all talked a lot about how we could make a film together that wouldn’t be “closed off,” beholden to the usual film grammar,...