If you have come to Projected Figures expecting accountancy, you are in the right place. Accountancy is what film writers do: counting minutes, counting words, reducing all cinema’s abstract expressions to calibrations, evaluations and calculated formulae on a simplified, and simplifying, worksheet. Critics, you see, operate a kind of reverse-alchemy, transforming vibrant sights and sounds into bland verbiage and, if you’re…
“No one would say that what they were doing was complicated”: Taking Time with Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004) was originally written as a booklet essay for a home release that never happened. It is intended for readers who have already seen the film, and contains spoilers from the start. Games of Entitlement A ‘primer’ is…
‘Blackie’ Bintou (Suzy Bembou), ‘Arab’ Morjana (Samarcande Saadi) and ‘whitie’ Amélie (Mathilde Lamusse) are high school best friends enjoying summer vacation together in their Parisian banlieue. When they are not partying with their tight group of friends, they collaborate on elaborate graffiti art, making their collective, colourful mark on an otherwise drab, neglected community. Despite…
The doll’s house is the arena where (typically) little white girls play out, or occasionally resist, the model of life that they have inherited from their family and culture, in an idealised, plastic parody of patriarchy. The Toy Terminator opens with an image of a doll’s house – a cottage (that is clearly a model)…
Paranoid Park first published by musicOMH Known to those who frequent it as Paranoid Park, the East Side Skate Park is a network of ramps and tunnels built by skaters for skaters – a sometimes frightening hang-out for the disaffected, dispossessed and disconnected youth of Portland, Oregon. It is also very near the location of…
Elephant first published by Movie Gazette Near the beginning of Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), two lengthy single-take tracking shots follows Donnie and other pupils and teachers through the corridors and exteriors of his high school, and as the camera meanders about in a hallucinatory swirl, the nostalgic familiarity of institutionalised adolescence is made to seem…
6:45 begins (and indeed ends) with close, loving sex. Bobby Peterson (Michael Reed) and his girlfriend Jules Rable (Augie Duke) adopt a variety of positions in bed together, directly engaging with each other through the contact of their bodies and adoring eyes, to their clear mutual satisfaction. Low lit and idealised, this union seems to…
Red Lights first published by Little White Lies “Why have you come here tonight? What are you hoping to see? Do you think I should surprise you? Do you think I should entertain you?” These are the questions that blind psychic extraordinaire Simon Silver (Robert De Niro) poses near the end of Red Lights, both…
FrightFest 2021 announces its format, and the first wave of its programme Horror thrives on uncertainty. It is the genre that confronts its viewers with irresolution and ambiguity. It derives its power – its very meaning – from the darkness. It culls the confident while allowing to survive only those flexible enough to channel, mirror…
Held first published by VODzilla.co Held begins with a young woman, her boyfriend and his male friend, all drinking in a car that is parked on a concrete tarmac in the middle of nowhere. It is all going well until the boyfriend announces, “She’s all yours,” and then tells his horrified girlfriend, “Relax , babe…
The Taste of Tea (Cha no aji) first published by Little White Lies, as part 113 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column Schoolboy Hajime (Takahiro Sato) runs panting across a rice field, but misses the train carrying away forever the girl from his class whom he loves but whom he has never had the courage even…
Becky first published by Through The Trees After a prologue – in fact a scene from the chronological end of the film – in which 13-year-old Becky Hooper (the amazing Lulu Wilson, Ouija: Origin of Evil, 2016) is being interviewed by a police detective and a psychologist about an incident involving some men and her…