Wonder, Horror, Mystery: Letters on Cinema and Religion in Malick, Von Trier, and Kieślowski

Wonder, Horror, Mystery is a dialogue between two friends, both notable arts critics, that takes the form of a series of letters about movies and religion. One of the friends, J.M. Tyree, is a film critic, creative writer, and agnostic, while the other, Morgan Meis, is a philosophy PhD, art critic, and practicing Catholic. The question of cinema is raised here in a spirit of friendly friction that binds the personal with the critical and the spiritual. What is film? What’s it for? What does it do? Why do we so intensely love or hate films that dare to broach the subjects of the divine and the diabolical? These questions stimulate further thoughts about life, meaning, philosophy, absurdity, friendship, tragedy, humor, death, and God. The letters focus on three filmmakers who challenged secular assumptions in the late 20th century and early 21st century through various modes of cinematic re-enchantment: Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The book works backwards in time, giving intensive analysis to Malick’s To The Wonder (2012), Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1988), respectively, in each of the book’s three sections. Meis and Tyree discuss the filmmakers and films as well as related ideas about philosophy, theology, and film theory in an accessible but illuminating way. The discussion ranges from the shamelessly intellectual to the embarrassingly personal. Spoiler alert: No conclusions are reached either about God or the movies. Nonetheless, it is a fun ride.

The Power of Technique and the Absence of Man in a Photographic Picture

The text problematizes the connection between art and the power of technology. The question arises: how can photography as an art, created as a technical invention, respond to the challenges of technical power, which manifests itself as an unconditional desire for domination that knows no limits? The esthetician from Sarajevo, Sadudin Musabegović, understood the very power of photographic representation precisely through the figures of division: mimesis - poiesis - techne. Martin Heidegger's opinion on technique is connected with the figure offered by Musabegović. Sadudin Musabegović's aesthetic thought provides possible answers to the question: how is a man present in photography itself when the famous film critic Andre Bazin said that photography is the only art we enjoy because of an absence of a human? And what role does art play in overcoming the crisis established by technology in the modern world? In the 'age of mass reproduction', art itself has lost its aura, as Walter Benjamin states, and Musabegović adds that even the photographed being has lost its aura. The problem of losing the aura can also be understood as a new beginning, as a ‘new source’ for art itself. But for the source itself, Musabegović says that he finds himself in the flow, that he is always outside himself, he is in the intertwining, permeation that manifests itself in a dynamic, reversible, and moving figure: mimetic activity – making techne – productive poiesis. This text aims not only to explain the meaning of this figure, which Musabegović established originally within aesthetics, and especially in the field of photography and film, but also to analyze its meaning in the context of unmasking the logic of modern technical control, which marked a modern way of living, thinking, and perceiving the world.

The Active Archive: Interview with Film Critic Andrei Rus

"The interview with dr. Andrei Rus, associate professor at UNATC Bucharest, tried to cover both the motivations and the developing process of the Active Archive projects, a work in progress activity of research, selection, digitalization, and dissemination of several old documentaries from the Sahia Studio Archives, on one hand, and several experimental movies made by students of the UNATC in the Sixties and Seventies on the other hand. Keywords: Andrei Rus, archives, archives activation, film archives. "

Post-Communist Romanian cinema: context and the turn to realism

"Romanian cinema needs to start again from scratch. It has to regain a sense of everyday reality and it has to render truthfully an important slice of recent history which has been horribly falsified. A blast of Neorealism is practically a moral obligation for our cinema at this time in its history." - Eugenia Voda, film critic, 1995. Romanian film critic Eugenia Voda has made this nearly prophetic statement only five years after the end of Romania's communist regime. Yet more than prophetic, her remark was an appeal to filmmakers, and their conscious as well as conscientious sense of truth. Although more than ten years have passed since, her words often resonate in close association with recent Romanian films and their honest representation of social reality, unique in the history of Romanian cinema. But to what extent is recent Romanian cinema a national cinema? Given the Western history of analysis of foreign cinematic productions, any current examination of non-Western films within a Western theoretical context must be carried out in relation to the prior theoretical developments, debates, and conclusions within the national cinema framework. Benedict Anderson's concept of the "imagined community' resides as foundation in the process of defining what is national (Anderson, 1983). When speaking of nationalist media, Anderson claims that while a nation is portrayed as a community, it is only an imagined one. Members of a nation do not all know each other, "yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (Anderson, 1983, p.6). From this perspective, cinema's popularity and ease of distribution has led to films becoming part of mass communications, and thus it can easily play a role in disseminating both national and nationalist ideals. persisted as a theoretical framework during the development and establishment of film studies as a Western academic discipline.

Post-Communist Romanian cinema: context and the turn to realism

"Romanian cinema needs to start again from scratch. It has to regain a sense of everyday reality and it has to render truthfully an important slice of recent history which has been horribly falsified. A blast of Neorealism is practically a moral obligation for our cinema at this time in its history." - Eugenia Voda, film critic, 1995. Romanian film critic Eugenia Voda has made this nearly prophetic statement only five years after the end of Romania's communist regime. Yet more than prophetic, her remark was an appeal to filmmakers, and their conscious as well as conscientious sense of truth. Although more than ten years have passed since, her words often resonate in close association with recent Romanian films and their honest representation of social reality, unique in the history of Romanian cinema. But to what extent is recent Romanian cinema a national cinema? Given the Western history of analysis of foreign cinematic productions, any current examination of non-Western films within a Western theoretical context must be carried out in relation to the prior theoretical developments, debates, and conclusions within the national cinema framework. Benedict Anderson's concept of the "imagined community' resides as foundation in the process of defining what is national (Anderson, 1983). When speaking of nationalist media, Anderson claims that while a nation is portrayed as a community, it is only an imagined one. Members of a nation do not all know each other, "yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (Anderson, 1983, p.6). From this perspective, cinema's popularity and ease of distribution has led to films becoming part of mass communications, and thus it can easily play a role in disseminating both national and nationalist ideals. persisted as a theoretical framework during the development and establishment of film studies as a Western academic discipline.

“Une force qui va”: Reflections on Gérard Depardieu in Danton

Taking as its starting point a 1978 article by film critic Molly Haskell, in which she described Gérard Depardieu as “tactile […] grasping, eating, touching, coming to physical terms with everything in sight”, this article considers a largely overlooked Depardieu role, as the committed revolutionary leader Georges Danton in Andrzej Wajda’s Danton (1983)—a historical role that reflects the actor’s commitment to the relevance of the Revolutionary politician and intellectual. By examining three key scenes, the article scrutinizes Depardieu’s acting style (body language, vocal delivery, movement choices) and demonstrates that he is committed to new ways of engaging with the ideological processes of acting. In Danton, Depardieu pivots between a familiar set of performative registers—physical menace and self-regarding sensitivity, timidity and flamboyance, innocence and cunning—so that the performance ultimately serves as a timely reminder of his enduring mythic status in French cinema.

Independent dreams, American nightmares: Industrial transgression and critical organization in the work of George A. Romero

Film critic Robin Wood categorized George A. Romero as a transgressive genre filmmaker, a director who with films such as Dawn of the Dead offered a consistent, and consistently bloody, attack on the normative social constructs that dominate US culture. Within such advocacy, Wood helped define Romero as a specific cultural type – as a horror film auteur. This article considers Wood’s framing within a wider critical, commercial and industrial context, asking how this ideological analysis became, paradoxically, part of a more conservative organization of Romero. By drawing upon business theory and a media industries methodology, I shed new light on Romero’s efforts to cultivate a boundaryless independent cinema unbeholden to institutional norms, demonstrating challenges to leadership roles, market orientation, financing and genre. While Romero’s typecasting as a horror auteur was ultimately delimiting, I also consider the filmmaker’s complicity in this codification, scrutinizing his knowing attempts to parlay brand-name recognition into a lasting platform for non-Hollywood production. This article offers a unique insight into the industrial and business contexts of horror cinema, revealing a rare intersection between critical reception and industrial navigation while complicating our understanding of both Wood’s seminal writings and one of the genre’s totemic ‘masters’.