Lizard Lover

A man stood over a lizard hole, waiting until the moment at which each lizard felt confident enough to show itself fully, then he stamped on it, to teach them to be more wary of emerging, he thought - forcing them to become more successful, to survive. He is in fact a tender-hearted lizard-lover, and the lizards are the emissaries of his emotions.

Chopin's Consumption

Achievements of inconceivable greatness and beauty are massacred every day in their own name, their desirability exploited not to inspire admiration but to feed a force of possessive greed. They are defiled by this desire, which sees the mindless consumer chewing gum and grinning inanely whilst sitting alongside the consumptive Chopin for a photo opportunity. Chopin’s weak, rattling cough is met with a clumsy slap on the back by the inhabitant of five star hotels who has driven him to his damp and draughty garret.

Smoke and Flowers

Le jour se leve - Marcel Carne. Jean Gabin, making a middle out of the margin. The central outsider, his mouth muscular from keeping those sharp lips pursed, he is the taciturn trumpeter of self-integrity. Helped by the frame of the screen, and the will of the eye to encompass, he defines the surrounding order, flushes it out, through a strongheaded opposition. The cinema of poetic realism is a cinema of resistance, of the misunderstood murderer, who killed to battle corruption.