The Slow, Easy Splendor of Peter Hujar’s Day

One early winter Thursday in 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz recorded photographer Peter Hujar as he recounted his activities over a 24-hour period. What was meant to spark a larger creative project never came to fruition, but finds new life some 50 years later in...

Mount Vesuvius Casts Its Shadow Over Below The Clouds

There must be a certain level of anxiety that comes with living in Naples, in the shadow of Vesuvius. It’s not just that it’s an active volcano that can blow its top at any minute, but also that it’s done so time and again throughout history, and that the most famous...

Not Your Typical Art Heist Flick

When you think about it, it’s wild that you can just stand feet from a van Gogh at the Museum of Modern Art with nothing but a wire, a guard, and the social contract keeping you from doing anything rash. The risk of leaving artworks so exposed is the tradeoff of...

Bunny Yeager’s Feminist Pin-Up Girls 

Linnea Eleanor “Bunny” Yeager embodied the contradictions of midcentury America. The photographer, who died in 2014 at the age of 85, was a flirty exhibitionist and a suburban housewife. She was a busy breadwinner and a mother of two. She flouted the social decorum of...

Examining the Legacy of Fascist Cinema’s Grand Dame

A woman roaming the mountainside splashes her face in an unseen stream. Her hair drips toward a crystal prism glowing in her steady hand. Mist fills the space around her; her silhouette is gilded in light. In this scene from the 1932 film Das blaue Licht (The Blue...

At 82, Meredith Monk May Finally Get Her Due 

“She, among all of us, was the uniquely gifted one — is the uniquely gifted one.” So avers none other than Philip Glass, minimalist composer extraordinaire. The “she” in question is Meredith Monk, whose unconventional genius epitomized the creative avant-garde during...

Who Are Museums Really For? And Can We Change Our Minds?

The cinematic journey in Binnigula’sa’ (Ancient Zapotec People) (2024) begins in the Mexican countryside. Modern civilization — signified by concrete, metal, and powerlines — peeks through the green landscape to reveal a more rigid world of roads,...

An Absurd Take on Masahisa Fukase’s Darkness

Few of Japan’s great photographers had a career as bold and multifaceted as Masahisa Fukase. Though largely defined by his black and white magnum opus Ravens (1986), a book of photographs in which the photographer casts himself as the grim black bird, Fukase managed...

The Renaissance, but Make It Game of Thrones

A documentary can sometimes tell a viewer more about the time it was made than the one it recounts. This holds especially true for films about the Renaissance, which has been so meticulously covered that new revelations are farther and fewer between. The three-part...

Rashaad Newsome’s Futurist Manifesto of Black Joy

Rashaad Newsome’s Assembly is technically a documentary about a performance. But calling it that feels small. Yes, it documents his installation at the Park Avenue Armory, but what it offers is a vision, a map, a speculative ritual for survival. At its core, Assembly...