Inspired by Lyndsay Michalik’s recent experiment in seven acts which was built around an act of crowd-sourcing and caught by her use of the term revolution, I write this to ask the question “can a …

[There will be a lull in the popOp production schedule from me for the next month as I am heading back up into the Swiss Alps to study at theory summer camp.]
jud jud jud jud …

The critical reception of Southland Tales at the 2006 Cannes Festival was pretty bad. The overarching sentiment was that Richard Kelly, darling of Donnie Darko fame, had been undone by ambition and sophmoritis. But let’s take the critics’ argument, then; let’s say that this is a case of failed cinema (and not simply the failure of the critics to get it. In accepting that something failed in this film, we’d need to consider what would mark the success of a film be?

All images are implicated and in some ways inseparable from their history. But what is the nature of history in movies? Rather than the chronological time we are accustomed to Richard Kelly’s films always wrestle with a repetition of time, going backwards in time and being always already in the future.

This is a messianic history.

Southland Tales is so over the top that it destroys the meaning of what we’ve watched. As Deleuze required in cinema: every moment of creation must not only create but resist and de-create reality. The cinematic image must be more real than reality and in so doing the cinematic image is like an act of thought, defined by their ability to de-create reality so as to create another reality. The film is not only about how the world stops, but how meaning ceases to be, by pulling the flux of meaning from out of the projected image.

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all round the sun
What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let …

I don’t need no doctor
My prescription tells me that
I don’t need no doctor
My prescription tells me that
All I need is my baby
You don’t know I’m in misery
–I Don’t Need No Doctor Humble Pie
This week’s installation …

A dreamer of pictures
I run in the night
You see us together,
chasing the moonlight,
My cinnamon girl.
Cinnamon Girl. Neil Young.
As you may have read, each week the avant guardian asks its contributors to write on a changing …