Everyone should see this film. Some thoughts on Una Giornata Particolare, a film about the day Hitler took a train to Rome to visit Mussolini.
Una Giornata Particolare
Loves of a Blonde
“Loves of a Blonde begins and ends with a song.” Some thoughts on the sad and beautiful film from the Czech New Wave.
Letter from the Editor, September 2023: Some sighs out their sentences, but some sings out their silences
I’m talking about creating something big together, working together on something, something good. Something money and cynicism can’t touch, because we have no use for any of that. Something we believe in, even if it seems a little crazy. An unholy ghost building made up of dream-filled rooms and corridors leading to vistas and light. A place where we can sigh out our sentences and sing out our silences.
An Obscure Field of Vision
A beautiful collaborative work of two photographers & poets, this haunting combination of film, words, and voice was created on a camera obscura made of recycled parts.
Le Gamin au Vélo
We’re given music. (And it does feel like a gift.) We’re given, specifically, a small, moving swell of music, like a warm gentle wave; a few notes from the second movement of Beethoven’s Emperor piano concerto. And then we return to the quiet world of this ridiculously beautiful expressive boy, to the sound of his breath, and of his madly pedaling feet.
Marwencol
Hogancamp is a true American eccentric, just as the people who first came to America must have been, and the people who created our country, and forged a path out west, surely were. He’s a flawed, brilliant, pessimistically-hopeful, demon-haunted world-builder.
July Issue, 2023
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis
Masculin Feminin is a film about the culture of youth, the sincere, foolish, self-absorbed search for meaning and identity. Godard, who was thirty-five when the film was shot, approaches the subject as an outsider, a documentarian, at once fascinated, amused, and dismayed by all that he sees.
Au Hasard Balthazar
We tend to make everything hold meaning for us as humans, but what the sheep and the donkey know feels deeper than allegories and metaphors and stories humans need to tell ourselves. It feels fundamental and honest and beautiful, and the movie ends the way it began, with the ringing of warm bells.
Temporada de Patos
It all just clicks, softly and almost imperceptibly. And then you don’t want your time with it to end, you want to spend more time with it, and you think about it after it’s gone, and realize that it’s much more complicated than you realize.
