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Optic Nerve is an independent film magazine that publishes new voices in film writing. Subscribe to get new issues as soon as they are released, along with the full digital archive of articles previously published in the magazine.
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What the Body Remembers - On The Sound of Falling by Mascha Schilinski (opens the original)
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It’s better to feel a film before understanding it.This quote from Robert Bresson opens the screenplay of The Sound of Falling, co-written by director Mascha Schilinski and Louise Peter. I don’t think anything could better describe what this film set off in me. Few films of recent years have stayed with me the way this one has after leaving the theater, partly because its exact meaning still hasn’t fully revealed itself to me, even months later.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="
“Things Heard and Seen: En Construcción” (opens the original)
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Yesterday evening, José Luis Guerín’s seminal 2001 documentary En Construcción (Work in Progress) showed at Anthology Film Archives. It marks the opening night of “Rubble on Screen: The Cinema of Demolition and Destruction”: a week long series that enquires about the nature of rubble which exists, and perhaps has always existed, as part of the wallpaper of human life. I didn’t recognise a number of films in the programme, but I was delighted to see that Guerín’s documentary was not only featured
Scenes from a Memory: Late Fame as a Eulogy of New York Counterculture (opens the original)
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Opening with a flourish of archival footage and video art pieces of New York City in the 60s and 70s, Late Fame, the latest film by former archivist and NYFF director Kent Jones, immediately establishes New York’s position as a historical cultural hotspot, the city that birthed the Beatnik generation, the New York Underground, punk and art rock, and the Wooster Group. Yet this introductory montage also illustrates the drastic changes that New York has taken over the last several decades. In the
Notes on Painting Shadow Calligraphy: A Bruce Wood Retrospective (opens the original)
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The Birds Tell Me All There Is To Know (opens the original)
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Mainstream cinema often conflates scale with immersion, selling the idea that towering screens and earth-shattering sound are what it takes to truly transport an audience. True immersion, though, is rarely a product of sheer size or sensory overload. Nowhere is this more obvious than at Spectacle Theater, a one-room movie house in Williamsburg showing films seven days a week for five bucks a piece. Spotlighting “overlooked works, offbeat gems, contemporary art, [and] radical polemics”, Spectacle
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