Dr Matthew Cipa

The Constant Factor (dir. Krzysztof Zanussi, 1980)

Contains all of that beautiful gentle blue light, early morning pastels, and infinite hues of white characteristic of a lot of 70s-80s European cinema (Rohmer, Pialat et al.). Contains beautiful shallow focus shots of faces, bodies between social layers of others. In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor characterises the

The Beast (dir. Bertrand Bonello, 2024)

The Beast is a film of inhabitation. Its sectioned, temporally expansive narrative strands avoid the cosmic gimmick of the Wachowskis Cloud Atlas. Anchored instead in a space that updates and changes the felt and material markers of historical and geographical time while keeping something constant across all of it: the