Sublime

Perversely, irony relies on some remains of cultural capital in order to coherently express its destructive message. If elevated beyond commentary and analysis to its own pedestal of artistic value, its essence become desacralization and the making trite of deep truths we might prefer to respect and conserve.

The subtitles, which make the most muffled speeches comprehensible, are an interference, though the raggedness of the sound makes Pialat's point: this isn't rhetorical dialogue, addressed to the audience to make dramatic and character points, but speech considered as a sound effect, part of the natural content of the image.

The film lionizes the rejection of narrative but, in a notable irony, places Brad Pitt at its centre. Neatly contradicting its own thesis,

all media remain part of a social, political, and economic landscape whose shifting contours resist any attempts at erosion through the mere rhetorical invocation of homogenous ones and zeroes.

contemporary accounts of proximity and distance, particularly those from post-1968 ideological critics, treat them as if spectator “positions” were effects of the textual

Academia stifles cinema, encircling it like a liana vine wraps round a tree, smothering and draining away all life. Construct films, don’t deconstruct them. Create poetry, don’t destroy it. Whenever I encounter film theorists, I lower my head and charge.