September 23, 2019

Can You Do Anything for Us?
On the documentaries of Anand Patwardhan
September 23, 2019
On the documentaries of Anand Patwardhan
Images have become not only animate, but incarnate.
Seemingly insincere, jokey phrases flip and become the nexus of an argument. Concomitance carries weight. A border of an image can be like the border of a nation-state; tension accumulates at an edge. For an image, the tension lies in the difference between the logics created within the picture plane and outside it. For nation-states, it is often the same—tension between colliding desires, incompatible ways of understanding, communicating, and seeing.
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April 9, 2018
Why do studios keep doing prequels if fans hate them? And why do fans hate them so much in the first place?
In other words, though the term is recent, the narrative technique of the prequel is not as new as it may appear. What is new, it seems, in modern prequels is their much lower ideological stakes. People were willing to kill and die over the legitimacy of Julius Caesar’s consolidation of imperial power in Rome, and despite the heated rhetoric of online debate, it is difficult to imagine anyone working up as much real-world fervor over George Lucas’s decision to posit a racial-biological basis for susceptibility to the Force in The Phantom Menace. Yet as the debates over diversity in casting and the portrayal of female leadership in the recent Star Wars films shows, story-telling decisions do carry a political-ideological charge, which is presumably not unrelated to their ability to provide the foundation for community and identity among particularly enthusiastic fans.
February 2, 2018
Greg Afinogenov, Gillian Brassil, Cosme Del Rosario-Bell, Jonah Furman, Emma Janaskie, Mark Krotov, Chris Looft, Nausicaa Renner, Tony Tulathimutte, Gabriel Winslow-Yost
Video games roundup
What has changed, two decades on, is the thrust of these games. There has been, in video-game sports as in the culture at large, an astonishing administrative bloat. The first time I noticed the shift was in playing GameDay 2000, a basic NFL simulator. Sure, you could play an NFL game, watch the tightly-packed polygonal men glitch through one another, watch the victory dances to buttrock anthems. But GameDay also let you start a franchise. Now, instead of calling plays and moving small men around, you were the GM. The game let you simulate entire seasons, no longer bothering with the incidental back-and-forth of moving a ball across a field, but playing football on a world-historic level. In the offseason you would trade and draft new players, based on stats generated by the computer, new rookies with computer-generated names populating your team, until your Chicago Bears were unrecognizable, the year was 2020, and your franchise had won the past decade of Super Bowl rings.
March 31, 2017
Some recent video games
Sometimes all you need for a good game is one idea. Superhot is a first-person shooter “where time moves forward only when you move.” If you stand still, so does time, letting you ponder oncoming attacks at leisure and line up every shot perfectly.
September 10, 2016
Aaron Braun, Malcolm Donaldson, Emily Lyver, Eric Wen
On this episode of the n+1 podcast, Moira Weigel joins us to talk about her essay “Slow Wars” about the slow cinema movement in foreign art films, the impact changes in filmmaking and film viewing technology have on the art form, and the nebulous terms of debate in slow cinema’s film criticism.
December 5, 2014
A Sentimental Education
The Hunger Games is a story about civil war over forms of government and control of the means of production. According to its own dialogue: a battle for democracy, justice, and the fruits of labor. But it also portrays a world in which a serious argument about politics is unimaginable, because politics, although worthy of a war, raises no hard or even interesting questions. It is just possible that this makes The Mockingjay: Part I the political movie for our time.
April 4, 2014
If President Reagan’s “drug-free America” is unrealistic, where instead might we hope to end up?