Writing an intro to a selection of your own essays is tough, so I’ll deflect the problem by heaping praise on Nancy Cantwell for curating the Times Quotidian Journal. She’s created a cultural playground of ideas and images that is unique and vibrant. I have never been a prose writer, so it was fun and challenging to talk about media. I had a couple of principles in creating these essays. The first was to write only about work to which I had a positive response and to report, muse, free associate. In that light, please know that the article about The Art of Killing, entitled Relax and Rolex, is mostly negative. However, in his follow-up film to The Art of Killing, The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer completely answered all the concerns I raised in my article, and created a powerful documentary which won the Academy Award in 2016. The other was to simply enjoy being an intruder in a practice to which I remain, in all ways, an outsider.
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Revisiting the World of EASY RIDER –
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Old Dog (2011), written and directed by Pema Tseden, produced by Zhang Xianmin –
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As a person who never felt “American” even though I was born here, I see, and admire a certain ethical and moral advancement, uniquely American, based on a deeply held belief in rationalism. Because I share neither this belief in rationalism nor the ethical advancement it engenders, I have always been amused by my husband’s selection of subject matter for his documentaries, and have always noticed that he was drawn to ethical/moral/sexual scenarios which raised many questions and inflamed both inter-personal and public controversy.
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