Cinema Archives - Public Seminar

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Blame it on Mommy and Daddy

October 10, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

It’s almost as if the selection committee for the recently ended sixty-third New York Film Festival (NYFF) was acknowledging that giants no longer walk the cinematic earth when it chose to screen Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Both directors are among the most important of American ...

Film

A Monk Without a Monastery

The paradigm shift of a single shot in Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days

December 2, 2024 • by Daniel Kopp and Nicholas Johnston

In the last shot of Perfect Days, this year’s Oscar-nominated masterpiece by Wim Wenders, a middle-aged Tokyoite named Hirayama drives through his city under a honey-colored sunrise. By this point in the film, we know it’s a habit for him to play a cassette in his ancient van’s tape deck ...

Film & Performing Arts

On “Slow Cinema”

Does this contemporary movement represent a gentle resistance to the values of contemporary society—or a surrender to elitist aesthetics?

December 18, 2023 • by Bella Okuya

A thoughtful reflection on the unique allure of "slow cinema", its impact on audiences, and the intriguing debate it sparks about cultural representation and elitism. ...

Film & Performing Arts

Three Thousand Years of Longing—And One Hour and Forty-Eight Minutes of Regret from This Humanities Professor

The new film from George Miller doesn’t do humanities scholars any favors

October 5, 2022 • by Hannah H. Kim

The problem of Three Thousand Years of Longing isn’t just that Alithea, our unfortunate representative, is unimaginative; the plot suggests the humanities have no natural home in the twenty-first century....

Three Thousand Years of Longing—And One Hour and Forty-Eight Minutes of Regret from This Humanities Professor

Feature

Blitzkrieg Baby

Why Paul Virilio’s critiques of warfare, acceleration, and media technologies remain prescient and essential

September 26, 2018 • by Ryan Bishop and Jussi Parikka

Chris Petit’s 1979 film Radio On features a striking opening scene with the camera zooming in on a note with the words: “We are the children of Fritz Lang and Wernher von Braun. We are the link between the 1920s and the 1980s.” The line could have easily been lifted from a ...

Multi Media

Intersectionality, Beauty & the Beast, and Defunding the NEH & NEA

Past Present Episode 76

March 31, 2017 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Neil J. Young and Nicole Hemmer

In this week's episode, Neil, Natalia, and Niki debate whether intersectionality is a religion, the live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, and Trump's plan to defund the NEA and NEH.

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show:

...

Intersectionality, Beauty & the Beast, and Defunding the NEH & NEA

Reviews

What Can Cinema Teach Philosophy?

Badiou and Rancière on Film

December 19, 2016 • by Emmanuel Alloa

Philosophy’s general distrust of cinema is a thing of the past. Cinema no longer serves only as a placeholder for reproving wrong conceptions of time (Bergson on the “cinematographic illusion”), as the incarnation of the distraction industry (Adorno), as a symptom of cultural depravation (Heidegger on the remove from “Japanese ...

Feature

Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, by Jonas Mekas

December 6, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

Back in the day when I was an aspiring young artist, one of my bibles was a well-worn copy (gotten at the late-great independent bookstore Paperbacks Unlimited) of Movie Journal, a collection of columns by filmmaker/impresario Jonas Mekas that had originally appeared in the Village Voice from 1959 to 1971, trumpeting the ...

Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, by Jonas Mekas

Uncategorized

Fury Road

May 22, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Australian film-maker George Miller is a master of the horizontal in cinema, of a certain kind of movement-image, where the landscape sliding away across the screen is a double of the movement of the frames of celluloid through the projector. At his best, Miller makes a cinema of pure kinetics, ...

Uncategorized

Anthropo{mise-en-s}cène

December 10, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

So this is the Anthropocene: An historical time, perhaps even a geological time, in which what we think of as separate entities, the human and the natural, find their fates entwined. What was once a separate nature or environment is no in place to ground us as us. Not only is ...

Uncategorized

Palestinian Cinema and the Lived Experience of Occupation

September 17, 2014 • by Hira Nabi

“One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, ...

Palestinian Cinema and the Lived Experience of Occupation

Uncategorized

Edge of Tomorrow: Cinema of the Anthropocene

June 11, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

This post has now been included in a broader piece on Anthrocene cinema, which is here. Watching the previews for the summer movies, they all seem to me to belong to the genre of the Anthropocene. They all seem to be narratives about a civilization confronting limits of its own making. ...