Week 9/2025

Yesterday, when walking in the street, I imagined a studio lamp crashing next to my feet out of the blue, like a star falling from the sky. When I would take a closer look at it, I would see its brand, Sirius. This happened to Truman Burbank, who begins to suspect his life is some sort of TV show. The Truman Show by Peter Weir has been analysed intensively, using theories by the likes of Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, or Slavoj Žižek, who tried to dissect my first pick of the week as well. Screened as part of a commemoration in David Lynch’s honour, Eraserhead follows the fate of Henry, who becomes a father and is deemed to care for a helpless and repugnant baby. On the subject of the gentle and frightened victim-hero of Lynch’s debut film, Žižek questions: “What, then, if THIS is the ultimate message of Lynch's film - that ethics is ‘the most dark and daring of all conspiracies,’ that the ethical subject is the one who effectively threatens the existing order?”

My last film tip is Guérilla des FARC, l’avenir a une histoire by Pierre Carles. He went to visit the FARC guerrillas in Colombia and see for himself the people who had systematically been described as “narco-terrorists”. There, he observes Nathalie Mistral, a guerilla from France, reading an article that has appeared about her. As she quotes the article, she laughs: “Madame Mistral chose for the jungle and left behind her children. She doesn’t even remember how many.” Carles proposes a “counter-discourse”, even if it can be called propagandistic. “If propaganda is about spreading minority ideas and dominated viewpoints, there is no need to have any qualms about it.”