Category: Essays
Just post-grad somnambulisms.
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Tarkovsky’s Mirror and the Crisis of Sentimentality in Art
Mirror’s aesthetic differs from Tarkovsky’s other films, to me. Maybe it’s the flurrying long grass or the delicate sunbeams through log cabin windows, but there’s such joy in every frame. Nostalghia is set amid ruins, Stalker an apocalypse, Solaris a derelict spaceship. They’re purposefully grim, but only to contrast the clear sentiment at the heart of them: hope. As their protagonists soak in their surroundings, like Baudelaire’s flâneur who wanders but doesn’t engage, they’re forced to look inwards to avoid the despair of their environment.
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Derrida’s Signification and Simulation in Vandermeer’s Annihilation
Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation turned 10 years old earlier this year. I only realised recently, when I was rereading it, that the entire trilogy turned 10 this year. He actually released them all in 2014 like the staggered singles of an upcoming album. The novel sees a group of nameless scientists enter a biologically contaminated zone called ‘Area X’ whose expedition causes their bodies to mutate as each organism within the zone metamorphosizes and blends into one another. It creates a (kind of?) body horror aesthetic this way.
