Undoubtedly, the most referenced colour in the history of art has been the colour blue; it is perhaps also the most magnificent. From its invention by the ancient Egyptians, to the painted parchment in medieval Psalters, through Renaissance brocades and vast perspectival grids defined by winsome skies to those manufactured by James Turrell via artificial light or real ones enhanced and framed like sculptures, blue has the undeniable lure and power of a paradoxical emotion: to excite yet appease.

By Andréa Picard  “Right now a moment is fleeting by!”—Paul Cézanne “Memory demands an image.”—Bertrand Russell “I don’t make movies about my life. I live my life like a movie.”—Lana Del Rey How often has a film or artwork been praised for capturing or visually demonstrating the ineffable? But what about the indelible, that which…

By Andréa Picard Published in Cinema Scope 75 (Summer 2018)   “There is a real contrast between the violence of the act of representation and the internal calm of representation itself.”—Le livre d’image Last summer, the Institut Lumière in Lyon run by Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux announced a full Godard retrospective for its annual restoration…

By Andréa Picard Published in Cinema Scope 71 (Summer 2017) With its wonderful Whitman-inspired title, On the Beach at Night Alone gave us one of the year’s most indelible images, so crushing, mournful, and beautiful in its abandon: Kim Minhee’s character Younghee lying forlorn in the sand on a cold beach. The solemn distress and…

By Andréa Picard With its wonderful Whitman-inspired title, On the Beach at Night Alone gave us one of the year’s most indelible images, so crushing, mournful, and beautiful in its abandon: Kim Minhee’s character Younghee lying forlorn in the sand on a cold beach. The solemn distress and physical destitution occasioned by Liebeskummer was palpable…

“Le Grand Balcon” is the name of the brothel in Jean Genet’s 1957 play Le Balcon, where it serves as a “house of illusions” (as one of the characters calls it) rather than simply a house of pleasure or tolerance.

By Andréa Picard L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961) is an enduring, mesmerizing modernist masterpiece. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of this Resnais/Robbe-Grillet collaboration—apart from its dapper design (including trimmed topiary) and Delphine Seyrig’s divinely breathy intonations and Chanel plumage—is its constant creation of spatial and temporal ambiguity, its perverse usurping of causal relationships between events…

By Andréa Picard “It is in a house that one is alone. Not outside of it, but inside. In the park there are birds, cats. Maybe even a squirrel, a ferret. We are not alone in a park. But in the house, we are so alone that we are sometimes lost.”—Marguerite Duras, Écrire Writing about…

Film/Art | We Can’t Go Home Again: Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie By Andréa Picard Originally published in Cinema Scope 64 (Fall 2015). “It is in a house that one is alone. Not outside of it, but inside. In the park there are birds, cats. Maybe even a squirrel, a ferret. We are not alone…

  By Andréa Picard “We dreamed of utopia and we woke up screaming.”—Roberto Bolaño, First Infrarealist Manifesto Last year, Vogue Paris published an issue devoted to the “avant-garde,” seemingly another instance of mainstream popular culture co-opting the language and ethos of radical art and politics. At a certain juncture, this would not have seemed so…

By Andréa Picard “The image always occurs on the border between two force fields; its purpose is to testify to a certain alterity, and although the core is always there, something is always missing. The image is always both more and less than itself.”—Serge Daney, Libération (reprinted in Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs…

By Andréa Picard When Heidegger assigned the virtue of truth to works of art, he did so while heeding to his own tastes as any aesthete would. The origin of a work of art, he opined, is where said authenticity lies. Determining provenance is thus imperative to understanding the essence of an artwork, which significantly…

By Andréa Picard “This fever is a nightly invader that strikes the patient during deep sleep. He jumps off his bed and runs to the bridge. There, he believes seeing beyond the waves, trees, forests, flowered meadows. His joy erupts in thousand exclamations. He experiences the most burning desire to flow into the ocean.”—Atlantiques “You…

By Andréa Picard “Ideas are a complete system within us, resembling a natural kingdom, a sort of flora, of which the iconography will one day be outlined by some man who will perhaps be accounted a madman.”—Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert, 1832 “How, in A.D. 1988, is it that human ingenuity has been unable, firstly…

  By Andréa Picard “You have to rack your brain to know how to film a location…You have to walk around it for a while if you want to find, to use a military term, a strategic lookout. There are not many. When you explore this question often enough, you see that, most of the…

By Andréa Picard “Language just, I don’t know, confuses things. Crazy.”—Cookie, in The History of Mutual Respect Disarmingly direct, it’s a gaze that will forever symbolize the tantalizing transition into modernity, as if a single woman harboured the power to dismantle centuries’ worth of objectification, prescribed Victorian codes of conduct, and the dominion of man.…

By Andréa Picard Twenty years ago, when under the rule of a sole dictator, we knew well whose wrists deserved to feel the sharp ends of our knives. Today, in a society so quick to judge and pass blame, the only flesh that remains to be examined is our own. Diaz’s camera, steadfast, unwavering, reveals…

By Andréa Picard In praise of pockets—perhaps this is the essence of Liu Jiayin’s cinema to date. Like the handbags and dumplings whose real-time creation in her quietly astonishing diptych (soon to be a trilogy) of Oxhide (2005) and Oxhide II (2009) provide the films with their structuring principles, Liu’s wit, originality, and ingenious deployment…

By Andréa Picard “As a filmmaker, I think we have to venture into the no man’s land that lies between reality and imagination, between documentation and fiction…Filming the impossible is what’s best in life.”—Joris Ivens “New languages aren’t invented in the editing phase, it is life undergoing a transformation that demands new languages…”—Alberto Grifi  …

By Andréa Picard “Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theatre (actors, directors, etc…) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create.” —Robert Bresson, Notes sur le Cinématographe “Art is like a fire; it is born out of…

By Andréa Picard “The intellect may be compared to a carver, but it has the peculiarity of imagining that the chicken always was the separate pieces into which the carving-knife divides it.”—Bertrand Russell In Toronto in early March to put the final touches on his transplanted 2008 Secession sensation Das Auge (The Eye) at the…

By Andréa Picard “These homes will be a means of resistance to a society that keeps me from becoming what I must become.”—Absalon “In Basque mythology the house or etxe is a sacred area where the living and the dead meet on equal terms.”— José Maria De Orbe The Israeli-born, Paris-dwelling sculptor Absalon chiselled his…