“There was a presence… I felt something I just can’t tell… it was too far.” ― Kristen Stewart as Maureen in Personal Shopper, 2016 Olivier Assayas’s 2016 film is stuck between its identity as an art film and a genre film. These distinctions are organized, with some inelegant neatness, around the dual life of Kristen Stewart’s… Read more »
Entries by Nathaniel Sexton
A Conversation with Award Winning Documentarian Frederick Wiseman
Guest post by Nathaniel Sexton. I recently had the opportunity of seeing Frederick Wiseman’s 1968 documentary High School for a second time, as part of IU Cinema’s ongoing Filmmaker to Filmmaker series. The last time I saw the film, over ten years ago, I was myself a student in a public high school. Indignation marked… Read more »
The Audience is Dead: Looking, Form, and Distance in Xie Fei’s Black Snow
Guest contributor Nathaniel Sexton explores ways in which Chinese filmmaker Xie Fei plays with and disrupts our ideas of audience in Black Snow. [Warning: contains spoilers.] “Above all, the Chinese artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him. He expresses his awareness of being watched. This immediately removes one of… Read more »