vol. 7, issue 1: capital Archives - cléo

Editor’s Note: Capital

mallory andrews — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:12:07 +0000

“Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure,” writes Tara Westover in her 2018 memoir Educated. Recounting her time as a severely cash-strapped college student, she explains why her academic performance was hindered by her material reality: “…my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, […]

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‘A film has to give’: An interview with Valérie Massadian about Milla

Annabel Brady-Brown — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:11:30 +0000

To give—what a startling idea in this era of acquisitive capitalism. But every aspect of Valérie Massadian’s filmmaking is a study in reciprocity. It’s in her patient camerawork, which takes in the physical gestures that often replace words. It’s in her keen sensitivity to the textures and details of domestic spaces: a rickety window frame, […]

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Revisiting Araya

ann lewinson — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:10:15 +0000

Margot Benacerraf’s 1959 film Araya opens with a horizontal pan over freeze-framed clouds: movement within stillness. It’s an apt first image for a film portraying a community in motion, frozen in time. Over aerial shots of arid land as alien as a moonscape, the narrator intones, “On this land nothing grew. All life came from […]

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Mechanical and Human: On Jill Sprecher’s Clockwatchers

Cason Sharpe — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:09:07 +0000

The monotony of modern office culture and its attendant angst are rarely treated as carefully as they are in Clockwatchers (1997), Jill Sprecher’s directorial debut. As a softer, more subtle precursor to Office Space (1999), Clockwatchers is a classic workplace satire from the depths of Generation X, but behind its lighthearted exterior sits a meditation […]

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Self-Possession in Janie’s Janie and Madeline’s Madeline

katie duggan — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:07:59 +0000

Josephine Decker, director of the 2018 experimental drama Madeline’s Madeline, said in an interview that while studying literature in college, she became “obsessed with this concept of the narrator.”[i] She was drawn to epic novels (like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) that toyed with the […]

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Failure and Queer Community in Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Annette LePique — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:06:40 +0000

In 1961, journalist and activist Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a groundbreaking work arguing that urban spaces flourish when meaningful human relationships are structurally nurtured.[i] In 1999, novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany revitalized Jacobs’ ideas on interconnectedness through his essay collection Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which […]

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The Value of a Woman’s Work in Roma and Finding Vivian Maier

Jannette Angelle Bivona — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:05:35 +0000

“What are you doing? Just tell me!” says young Pepe. “I can’t, I’m dead,” replies Cleo, lying still on the rooftop. Pepe rolls over and shuts his eyes. “Hey, I like being dead,” Cleo says. This small scene near the start of Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-nominated Roma although brief is one of its most insightful. In […]

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Love in Two Cities: Romance and Ritual in Rajnigandha

Kanika Katyal — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:04:12 +0000

On a train roaring at full speed, a young woman jerks awake. Her hair is disheveled; her saree is in disarray. Alone and anxious, she frantically gathers her things and gets off at the next station. But then she turns back, changing her mind. Running behind the train, she trips and falls. Empty before, the […]

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Who We’re Watching: Sandi Tan

michelle kay — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:01:10 +0000

There’s a moment in the 2018 documentary Shirkers when narrator and filmmaker Sandi Tan says, “We were no longer magical kids who made a movie. We were just kids.” She’s referring to what happened after her friend and mentor, an American filmmaking instructor named Georges Cardona, disappeared in 1992, taking her movie with him. Tan, […]

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vol. 7, issue 1: Capital

mallory andrews — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 13:58:35 +0000

“I’m not gonna spend the rest of my life working my ass off and getting nowhere just because I followed rules that I had nothing to do with setting up, OK? Melanie Griffith’s Tess, the put-upon secretary and protagonist of Working Girl (1988), exclaims this to her coworker when she makes the drastic decision to […]

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