“On July 5, 1968—just three months after King’s assassination and the April 16th settlement that ended the strike—blues musician Furry Lewis was quietly shedding tears while entertaining friends at a party in his Memphis home. … The previous day had marked the nation’s first Independence Day since King’s death, yet for many black Americans in 1968, the Fourth of July offered little cause for celebration.”
“In At Land, and in Meshes also, domestic interiors signify the world of human society in which the protagonist is contained and trapped, but here there is also an exterior world of landscape and seashore, in which she becomes empowered and where she acts with confidence and certainty.”
“From descriptions of individual feminine experience floating free of both social context and narrative hierarchy, to descriptions of individual feminine experience placed in radical juxtaposition against historical events, to explicitly feminist speculations about feminine experience”.
“Spirits return because something in the social fabric was left unfinished—an unacknowledged injustice, a normalized cruelty, a promise broken within a rigid order that leaves little room for repair.”
“Surrounded by people who were almost entirely unrepresented in film, Davis found her calling. She returned to the US galvanised — she would dedicate her career to telling their stories.”
Songs about home: missing home, leaving home, memories of home, defining home.
“Cinema becomes an unofficial archive—not of triumph, but of evidence. It records not what we achieved, but what we allowed to disappear.”
“To them, popular culture mattered, it was vibrant, and it was politically up for grabs.”
“The greatest films, I have always believed, are empathy machines. They allow us to see the world through eyes that are not our own.” A beautiful love letter to cinema by Amir Zadnemat
Gideon Leek rewatches King Vidor’s classic, in which a young man with big dreams moves to New York City and becomes an identical cog who learns to love the machine of modernity.
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