By David Ryan. Aspires to explore important themes about perception and insight from a trauma-focused narrative but is often undone by its own scrimping of dramatic focus and coherence.” Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024) is a mature but disappointing adaptation of the last few books of Homer’s The Odyssey, centering […]
Alchemy, Technology, and the Cinematic Grimoire: E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1989)
By Gary D. Rhodes. How of one ounce of Silver maie Silver be noe more.” – Thomas Norton, The Ordinall of Alchimy (1477)* Embodied practice and cinematic technology yields alchemical crucible in E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten, a non-dialogue film of 1989 that the London Film Festival declared “breaks all moulds, […]
Katabasis and News of the World
By Ken Hall. The journey undertaken by Captain Kidd (Tom Hanks)…through Texas causes him to pass through ‘alien territory’ in a double sense. He is not closely acquainted with some of the locales which he encounters nor with the routes to those locales. Perhaps more important is the underlying strangeness of the […]