Dear Reader,
When I put out the call for this issue, part of me wondered whether or not I’d offered a subject too wide-ranging to yield any sort of coherence in engagement. “Painting and literature, theater and music” comprise film, as Akira Kurosawa points out. Would the scope of this medium prove unwieldy for the limited space allotted?
While these pieces approach their subjects idiosyncratically, a throughline seems to have come to fruition regarding ideas about the relationships between truth and image, dream and real life, the material and immaterial.
For example, Jim Whiteside draws attention to “the camera trained on your life’s performance”, a line I’ve had trouble shaking since first encountering it. “Performance”, a term connotative of staging—of antonymy to whatever fabrics constitute reality—is simultaneously a term meaning to carry out a literal action, and seems a fitting meditative crux for this issue.
The work collected here ranges from direct ekphrasis to engagements with the industry at large. Sophia Terazawa weaves a polyphonic tapestry with threads drawn from the works of Andrei Tarkovsky, Julie Dash, and Trần Anh Hùng, among others. Danilo Marin maneuvers through the surreal interstices between his speaker’s mindscape, Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, and Francisco de Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei. Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s speaker navigates the dual forces of romance and celebrityhood at a wrap party in which the veil between normalcy and stardom grows thin, and Renée Lepreau’s verse filmography, written two years shy of Alain Delon’s passing, preserves an ice-cold on-screen life in amber.
You’ll come across essays that illuminate the work of Wong Kar Wai and Edward Yang. Danielle Shi dives into the synchronized states of reverie and waking life through which characters travel in Chungking Express. Aiman Tahir Khan, by revisiting Yi Yi over the course of a month, evidences the richness in its craft by cataloguing the film’s accumulative resonances.
You’ll also encounter work that traffics in the physical characteristics of film. Chris Crowder brings the reader along on a lyric journey into sound capturing, while Holly Willis takes a material approach to film analysis, conjuring striking images of film strips in various states of dissolution as both a critique of Hollywood and celebration of the beauty of the medium.
Many thanks to Khaled Mattawa for this opportunity, and to Elinam Agbo and Aram Mrjoian, whose wisdom and guidance made this issue of Mixtape possible. Spending time with this work has been a great joy, and it’s an honor to be presenting it to you.
—Michael O’Ryan
Michael O’Ryan is a Zell Fellow in Poetry at the University of Michigan, where he received his MFA and won a Hopwood Award. His work appears or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, and Best New Poets.