I read through the drafts. All of them because I don’t want to make easily dismissible arguments against the Empire. The stakes are too high.
Petty Materialism: On Metaphor & Violence Read More »
I read through the drafts. All of them because I don’t want to make easily dismissible arguments against the Empire. The stakes are too high.
* Kaveh Bassiri *
“The most disgusting film I ever made.”
Rainer Werner Fassbinder on Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?
When I was an undergrad at Santa Clara University, I took buses to San Francisco to see foreign movies. I remember rushing into a double-bill of Rainer Werner Fassbinder films. During the first movie, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970), I had to go to bathroom. I thought nothing important is going to happen, so I went.
When the Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary Read More »
* Kaveh Bassiri *
“The most disgusting film I ever made.”
Rainer Werner Fassbinder on Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?
When I was an undergrad at Santa Clara University, I took buses to San Francisco to see foreign movies. I remember rushing into a double-bill of Rainer Werner Fassbinder films. During the first movie, Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970), I had to go to bathroom. I thought nothing important is going to happen, so I went.
I recall standing on a platform before a television set, which was shrouded in funereal black cloth, and which played on loop a talk given by a grave white-haired scientist in a lab coat. The screen was grainy in a way I discerned to be fake: each trawling black worm was evenly sized, evenly spaced on the screen. The actor playing the scientist would cough when the screen broke up, due to an untimely earthquake disrupting the calm of his lab; the cough gave him away as an actor. My suspicion that the scientist was an actor made the film in which he appeared no less terrifying to me, a sensitive child, a nervous child.
Thirteen Ways of Talking About a Volcano Read More »
I recall standing on a platform before a television set, which was shrouded in funereal black cloth, and which played on loop a talk given by a grave white-haired scientist in a lab coat. The screen was grainy in a way I discerned to be fake: each trawling black worm was evenly sized, evenly spaced on the screen. The actor playing the scientist would cough when the screen broke up, due to an untimely earthquake disrupting the calm of his lab; the cough gave him away as an actor. My suspicion that the scientist was an actor made the film in which he appeared no less terrifying to me, a sensitive child, a nervous child.
