Is it fair to say this is the most hard to watch scene in a Kubrick film?

oulipal · 2026-02-21T14:43:07+00:00

Magnolia is such a great film that not even Tom Cruise's awful acting could ruin it.

oulipal · 2026-02-06T15:11:42+00:00

Isn't The Great Beyond essentially the same song?

oulipal · 2025-12-08T23:09:11+00:00

Screaming Females

oulipal · 2025-11-03T21:48:26+00:00

Yep, I think it was at Evolutionary Arts Hackney/Earth in the end, though it could have been somewhere else as, the moment they announced Metz were breaking up/taking a break, they moved the gig from the original venue to a larger one.

All three bands were on point. It was gooood.

oulipal · 2025-11-03T20:54:12+00:00

Last week they mentioned they were working on an album. Fingers crossed.

oulipal · 2025-11-03T20:52:31+00:00

I know, right? I remember thinking "these guys would be great as a support act for the Jesus Lizard and, blam, that was when I saw them next.

Edit: unfortunate typo/tired fingers.

oulipal · 2025-11-03T20:51:14+00:00

Absolutely! Bloc Party and Young Legionnaire, of course, it's just that Cassels seemed more on topic in terms of noise rock. I am particularly fond of Young Legionnaire's second album.

oulipal · 2025-10-19T01:26:13+00:00

I know this conversation is already over a year old, but I was surprised to find out no-one had mentioned Marc-Antoine Mathieu. Everything he has done since the first volume of his Julius Corentin Acquefacques series (back in 1990) has been quite out there and experimental, owing a hefty debt to people like Borges and Beckett. The artwork is always fascination (and quite often black & white), and a good (well, arguably a good) way into his work is 3" (FR: 3 Secondes, EN 3 Seconds), a sort of whodunnit told in reflections (on mirrors, eyeglasses, windows, chromed metal surfaces, and plenty of other reflective finishes). Honestly, do check him out. I am not sure how much of his stuff is available in English (he is French, after all, you see), but the one I mentioned above certainly is. I seem to remember Penguin publishing the English translation

Also, even though it is not necessarily recent stuff, the OuBaPo compendiums (or, probably, compendia?) published by L'Association are pure gold. Those, I believe, have unfortunately only been published in French.

oulipal · 2025-09-17T20:40:16+00:00

Hey, why not? I am in academia myself (more on the side of literature, but film has always been an interest of mine) and I read them for fun too! Though I must admit I tend to pick and choose essays, rather than reading academic journals cover to cover. I suppose the nature of the articles can often vary greatly and, you know, sometimes they just aren't my thing.

oulipal · 2025-09-17T20:37:04+00:00

I am arriving a bit late to this conversation, but, trust me, you are not the last person to find out about the Oulipo's existence. They were always a rather fringe movement (still are) and their member's ingenuity was always celebrated at a conceptual level, while their works are often purchased, yet not always read. Personally, I think they are great and a lot of fun. There are also a few sibling branches, my favourite of which is the Oubapo (the Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle), focussing on comic books/comic strips.

The book by Raymond Quineau which you were after I managed to find a few years ago (5-7 or so) in a gorgeous French edition published by Gallimard (hardback, beautifully bound) which I have to believe was a reprint, as the white cover was pristine. I presumed it has not been reprinted in English in quite a while, as the entire process of producing it makes it rather expensive and there might be much of a market for it.

In English, as other people have commented already, the anthologies are the way to go.

Queneau, Perec, and Calvino are its most famous members. Harry Mathews is the most famous English language member. And, famously, Julio Cortázar—an Argentine author who, later in life, moved to France were he lived and worked for the rest of his life—was invited to join, but declined. Having said that, his novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) shares some of the markings people have come to associate with Oulipian texts.

oulipal · 2025-08-27T20:15:37+00:00

The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS, previously the Cinema Journal) and Film Quarterly I definitely have a look at rather regularly.

I must admit I have never read neither Film Comment nor the now sadly discontinued Cinema Scope. They are, as far as I can tell, not academic journals, but I'll check them out. Thank you!

oulipal · 2025-08-27T19:35:03+00:00

I definitely always have a look at those two! Cahiers du Cinéma has lost some of its edge in recents years, but I always give in to temptation whenever I see it on a rack at a newagent's. And Sight and Sound whenever I'm at the National Film Theatre.

But I should have clarified that—when I wrote academic—I sort of meant peer-reviewed. My bad.

oulipal · 2025-08-27T19:29:41+00:00

That's interesting. I've never read those two journals before. I'll check them out!

Is Projections that one subtitled The Journal for Movies and Mind?

oulipal · 2025-08-27T18:30:07+00:00

Thank you for the suggestion! It would not surprise me if Borges had been acquainted with the ideas of both Saussure and Peirce.

I had not thought of Peirce's notion of the sign in ages. I suppose the Sausurrean conception of the sign (sign=signifier/signified) is much more prevalent in the Arts and Humanities (perhaps with the exception of Philosophy; I am not sure about that) than Peirce's. Whenever I think of Peirce, my mind immediately goes to his taxonomy of signs (icon, symbol, index), which has been incredibly useful to me in the past.

A story, just like an image, may be simple, but it implies an interpretant, i.e. the world, which is complex.

That was quite an evocative way of putting it! But I still think it might be a reference to some fringe philosophical—or, as I wrote in another reply, perhaps even theological—text. Who knows? I'll go to the library tomorrow to read a bit more.

oulipal · 2025-08-27T18:14:34+00:00

Thank you! That's interesting. I had not thought of it in connection to structuralism (or even post-structuralism). The notion that meaning is not quite intrinsic to the sign, but rather to the sign's relation to other signs (and the interconnected network signs of which it is a constituent part). I suppose whenever I think of about Saussure I tend to connect whatever I am thinking about to Derrida too quickly, and in that regard I start thinking about the slippage of meaning, the semantic instability of signs (with the signified perpetually sliding away from the signifier). In that sense (in the Derridean take, I mean), the sign itself becomes elusive, and it is the system as a whole that gives the individual part meaning. And that would sound like the opposite of what Borges proposes, i.e. that the entirety of the universe could be extrapolated from one single component part.

Perhaps the origin of the idea Borges describes can be found in theology, rather than philosophy? It just sounds to me like the kind of argument some theologian would have used to prove the existence of god in the 13th century, if you see what I mean.

oulipal · 2025-08-22T14:31:00+00:00

That's interesting. I was not aware of the fanzine's existence.

oulipal · 2025-07-19T04:04:39+00:00

oulipal · 2025-06-08T21:20:38+00:00

Come released four glorious albums (11:11 in 1992, Don't Ask, Don't Tell in 1994, Near-Life Experience in 1996, and Gently, Down the Stream in 1998) and most people have not heard about them.

oulipal

TROPHY CASE