My Reading Traces - Jacques Derrida - Voyous

 

My Reading Traces - Jacques Derrida - Voyous

 

Clive Barker - Hellraiser (1987)

 

No, it is not the newest Rubik's Cube! You must have recognized it already. Yes, it is - now after nearly 40 years - an uncut Hellraiser. This is already very funny, since all the knife cuts and all the other charming mutilations are still there. I remembered the main gadget as some kind of super silly Rubik's Cube, the BDSM Edition. 

But surprise surprise - it was not a cube but a box called "The Lament Configuration". A brilliant commentary in the bonus material reads the film as an essay about the desire of "unboxing".

That's more interesting than the film itself. Since Hellraiser remains one of the cornerstones of an ultra cruel cinema conceived by and for misogyne psychopaths. The motto of this kind of cinema that is still working (until "John Wick" down to "Dune 1 and 2"): "Go away woman, I have some killings to do". And there is (how wonder) a strictly male self destructive chain of box owners.

It is also the film with the silliest hairstyles. Pinhead, really? And a film with the most gifted short legged Charlotte Rampling impersonator. But also one with a poorly talented impersonator of Jennifer Connelly.

But it belongs also to the truth that it remains one of the most indigestible and deadly serious films of all times. If you want to make (no) friends show it at your next birthday party.

Pyrrhocoris apterus enjoying the sun

 

Pyrrhocoris apterus enjoying the sun.

(Foto: SKG, 3/2026)

My Reading Traces: Jacques Derrida - Spectres de Marx

 

My Reading Traces: Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort

 

My Reading Traces: James Joyce - Finnegans Wake

 

My Reading Traces: James Joyce - Finnegans Wake

 

My Reading Traces: Paul de Man - Allegories of Reading

 

Ti West: The Sacrament (2013)

 

In a way Eli Roth's "The Green Inferno" (2013) is the evil and even more apocalyptical twin to this film. If you are dreaming of a life in seclusion and harmony watch both films at once or after one another. Yes, ethnographical interests often end in death and destruction. Paradise lost. And Ti West's "The Sacrament"(2013) is a really good, deadly seriously and uncanny mockumentary about Jonestown. Back to nature and back to the spirit are equally self-destructive movements.

My Reading Traces: Paul de Man - Allegories of Reading

 

My Reading Traces: Paul de Man - Allegories of Reading

 

My Reading Traces: Paul de Man - Hypogram and Inscription

 

My Reading Traces: Paul de Man - The Resistance to Theory

 

My Reading Traces: Paul de Man - The Resistance to Theory

 

My Reading Traces: Jacques Derrida - La peine de mort

 

My Reading Traces: San Juan de la Cruz - ... aunque es de noche

 

Frederick Wiseman is dead

Frederick Wiseman. Photo: Antoine Yar/Wikimedia Commons.

* 1. Januar 1930 in Boston, Massachusetts

 † 16. Februar 2026 in Cambridge, Massachusetts

One of my most admired directors passed way. I believe that I have watched at least 70 percent of his films. And I am still afraid to watch his "Near Death"(1989). It is darkly funny that this title coincides with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the near death of global socialism. In any case my favorites are "Missile"(1987) which is also in a certain way a film about near death. And "The Store" (1984) and "Meat" (1976) about the cruelty and the violence of global capitalism.

He will remain together with maybe Robert Kramer the most important cartographer of the modern post Shoah world. So much sadness and mourning in his world. He already saw America dying -- decades before it happens right now before our own eyes.

David Wellington: The Carpenter (1988)

 

Bizarrely unconnected story lines, in parts dreamlike.

A female and male psycho meet.

The undead male is ludicrously connected to a house.

The abused female comes directly out of a mental institution.

In a part also love story with a feminist twist. 

Maybe a film about editing living bodies with tools. 

Or it simply adds another reason why anyone hates to have craftsman in the house.

First feature film with a masterly and almost idiotically overachieving camerawork by the now famous David Franco.

Worthy of watching it mainly for this reason. 

Giacomo Abbruzzese: Disco Boy (2023)

When dreams melt into the world, and vice versa.

And one meets one's Doppelgänger in the jungle.

When death becomes life, and vice versa in a series of transgressions.

If any comparison would even be possible it would be:

Weerasethakul.

A deeply original work. Don't miss it!

Joel Potrykus: Vulcanizadora (2024)

A self destructive Buddy Movie, if there ever was one.

Deeply sad and moving.

I give you an allusion to the mood of this film:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

(and yes, it's Wordsworth)

Roger Laporte: Moriendo (1995)

"Quelle est donc cette douceur, 

cette terrible douceur?"

Roger Laporte, Moriendo(1995)