Querelle is a bloated, pretentious and incredibly convoluted mess of a film – and it’s one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s greatest achievements. Not normally a film discussed outside of the context of being the director’s final work, it is something that appeals more to those interested in looking at Fassbinder’s oeuvre in more detail, than…

Absurdity can take many different forms, particularly when it comes to artistic expression, with many individuals over the past century making their living from subverting the central tenets of reality. One such artist was Karen Shakhnazarov, whose ambition film Zerograd (Russian: Gorod Zero) holds the distinction of being one of the most bizarre works of…

There are a few artists whose entire reputation is essentially built from their penchant for the strange and absurd – David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Cronenberg usually sit atop this pedestal, with their very different styles making them profoundly unique filmmakers, differing in style, but united in their general ambivalence to traditional logic. However,…

Here are a few things I know to be true: firstly, the Japanese New Wave is one of the most sorely underrepresented of all film movements, with many of its works being tragically ignored in favour of others, which is truly shameful since some of the most inventive films ever made were produced by this…

Sergei Parajanov was truly one of the greatest artists across any medium. His films reflect so much deep understanding for life, always being poignant celebrations of the fragility of existence, channelled through some of the most gorgeous imagery ever committed to film. His penultimate completed film was The Legend of Suram Fortress (Georgian: ამბავი სურამის…

Notes on an Appearance is an inherently difficult film to understand, and also one of the fascinating works of contemporary postmodernism. It is necessary to once again bring out the taut quote by Lyotard, where he proclaims postmodernism, or rather what we generally consider to be the most succinct definition of it, as “incredulity towards…

There’s something so ethereal about the films of Sergei Parajanov, a filmmaker whose work defined a particular era of Soviet storytelling, one that was both celebratory of the history of the culture, but critical of the socio-political zeitgeist, even if it wasn’t very clear in the films themselves. His most celebrated work is The Color…

In a secluded home, somewhere distantly in the desert of Ukraine, resides an elderly man (Dmitri Milyutenko). He has lived a long, challenging life, experiencing enormous social and cultural unease, coupled with the violence wrought from a flawed political system and the poverty that comes as a result. Over the course of what appears to…

One of art’s most iconic quotes comes on behalf of Salvador Dalí, who famously quipped “I don’t do drugs, I am drugs” when asked about the origins of his surrealist tendencies, and what inspired him to experiment with form in such an unprecedented manner. In many ways, the same principle could be applied to Věra…