A Movie Can Be Like A Friend And An Antidepressant

Osaka castle overlooking Nippon Life Stadium, 1960.

cut my hair once myself, now i'm the family hairstylist 🫠

Samfya Women Filmmakers filming Hidden Truth

Language is presented as an instrument of fraud and cruelty (the blaring newscast; Elizabeth’s cruel letter to the psychiatrist which Alma reads); as an instrument of unmasking (Alma’s excoriating portrait of the secrets of Elizabeth’s motherhood); as an instrument of self-revelation (Alma’s confessional narrative of the beach orgy) and as art and artifice (the lines of Electra that Elizabeth is delivering on stage when she suddenly goes silent; the radio drama Alma turns on in her hospital room that makes the actress smile). What Persona demonstrates is the lack of an appropriate language, a language that’s genuinely full. All that is left is a language of lacunae, befitting a narrative strung along a set of lacunae or gaps in the ‘explanation’. It is these absences of sense or lacunae of speech which become, in Persona, more potent than words while the person who places faith in words is brought down from relative composure and confidence to hysterical anguish. Here, indeed, is the most powerful instance of the motif of exchange. The actress creates a void by her silence. The nurse, by speaking, falls into it – depleting herself. Sickened almost by the vertigo opened up by the absence of language, Alma at one point begs Elizabeth just to repeat nonsense phrases that she hurls at her. But during all the time at the beach, despite every kind of tact, cajolery and anguished pleading, Elizabeth refuses (obstinately? maliciously? helplessly?) to speak. She has only one lapse. This happens when Alma, in a fury, threatens her with a pot of scalding water. The terrified Elizabeth backs against the wall screaming “No, don’t hurt me!” and for the moment Alma is triumphant. But Elizabeth instantly resumes her silence. The only other time the actress speaks is late in the film – here the time is ambiguous – when in the bare hospital room (again?), Alma is shown bending over her bed, begging her to say just one word. Impassively, Elizabeth complies. The word is ‘Nothing’. At the end of Persona, mask and person, speech and silence, actor and ‘soul’ remain divided – however parasitically, even vampiristically, they are shown to be intertwined.

Persona | Review by Susan Sontag

seeing a woman call themselves tme is so fucking embarrassing…. girl grow a spine, you may as well have mens rights activist in your bio. “ohhhh sir im sooo sorry i only experience regular boring ole misogyny and not the super special extra terrible misogyny that bepenised people experience🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 here ill label myself so everyone knows im lucky enough to be exempt from REAL oppression” holy god where is your dignity…

Chantal Akerman

- Je, tu, il, elle AKA I, You, He, She

1974

you ask a student in april how they're doing and they'll say "oh i'm fine" but in reality they are treating themselves in such a way that violates the geneva convention on treatment of prisoners

the disdain mind-body dualists have for the body. don't call my body a meat sack you fucking rube