A MAGAZINE ABOUT STYLISH CINEMA
A focus on our relationship with cinema and how we draw inspiration from it. Harpist, musician and model Xiaoqiao selects her three titles.
FILM PICKS WITH
XIAOQIAO
Suzhou River (2000) Directed by Lou Ye
"A wet lucid nocturnal dream, restless, manic love noir, floating through a dripping tunnel in Lou Ye’s haptic, elusive, almost hallucinated first-person handheld lens. One of my favorite adolescent bibles, the gritty underworld of millennial Shanghai, an urban myth from its abandoned factory banks of mermaid and a feral phantom love forever haunts me."
Malina (1991) Directed by Werner Schroeter
“With my burned hand, I write of fire.” -Ingeborg Bachmann
"Films about writers often seem cursed to cinematic opacity, as the revolutions per minute of a writer’s mind slip beyond the grasp of a camera, while the act of writing itself remains nearly inert. Malina, Schroeter’s psychic adaptation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 novel, feels almost impossibly precise and unreal, scorched in the volatile logic of dream, a fevered, psychosexual stream of consciousness. Isabelle Huppert incarnates the writer in recurring flames as she edges toward self-immolation, frenzied, weary, haunted by her delusions and ghost of a violent man, love, erasure, death, her almost somnambulant monologues, eroding into writerly agony, a broken female psyche. Script hauntingly adapted by Elfriede Jelinek, writer of the book on which Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) is based."
At Land (1944) Directed by Maya Deren
"Maya’s cinema forever changed me, an impenetrable fluid labyrinth dissolving time and space into the uncanny logic of dreams, tactile, bizarre and forever free. John Cage casually lent his presence to this short, and the chess scene by the ocean later echoed in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal."