Films byTexts by Thom Andersen

Thom Andersen (1943) is an American filmmaker, film critic and teacher. He has made several essayistic films, including Red Hollywood (1996), Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Get Out of the Car (2010) and The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015). In 2017, Visible Press published Slow Writing, a collection of his articles on cinema.

Article EN
29.05.2019
Fire in Every Shot

Wang Bing’s Three Sisters

But fire also burns in the face of Yingying, the dutiful, stoic eldest daughter who yearns to read and write and study, to discover something unattainable in this tiny, remote village. There is fire even in her dirty, white-hooded jacket with the words “Lovely Diary” on the back, a jacket she never takes off throughout the film. She never demands anything, and she barely speaks, yet she is one of the most compelling, most affecting figures in all of documentary cinema.

Compilation EN
25.01.2017
On Sleep

A strange thing occurs. The world becomes transposed, intensified, electrified. We see it sharper than before. Not in dramatic, rearranged contexts and meanings, not in the service of something else [...] but as pure as it is in itself: eating as eating, sleeping as sleeping, haircut as haircut.