jean-luc godard – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

The Corona Diaries: Coming up for air

May 30, 2020May 30, 2020MattLeave a comment

This is Matt again, so don’t expect the artsy playing with structure you get from Mege. Things here have been looking up for a week or two now, pandemic-wise. The numbers are great, almost disconcertingly so; listening to This American Life or Radiolab podcast episodes describing the situation in New York, for instance, feels like listening in on a parallel universe where COVID-19 struck fast and struck hard, while here, in Switzerland? Well, since we’re all about damn fine cups of culture, let’s put it in cultural terms: I’ll be able to go to the cinema on 6 June.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #31: Mind the gaps

Apr 4, 2020Mar 30, 2020MattLeave a comment

d1ad56da-abce-4afe-9f45-79294aede9e3 We’re back after a three-month break – and right in the middle of a pandemic. What better time than this to listen to some new podcast goodness, though? And what better time to look at the gaps we’ve all got in our film-watching track record?

This month, Julie and Matt talk about the huge swathes of cinema that we’ve missed so far – the genres, eras and countries we’re barely aware of, the directors that everyone loves but we bounced off of, the films we’ve got on an ever-growing pile on a bookshelf that we keep telling ourselves we should finally watch. Grab a hot, fresh cup and join us for episode 31 of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture! Continue reading →

Here’s looking at you, and you – and you, Agnès

Apr 16, 2019Apr 16, 2019MattLeave a comment

It’s a comical image: the gigantic works of art, plastered on the side of buildings and in one case even a towering stack of shipping container, and looking at them, the tiny, old woman with her white-and-red hair who helped bring these gargantuan images about and document them on film… though while she may be tiny and old, she most definitely isn’t frail. In fact, she stands as tall as anyone and anything in the film.

Visages Villages

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A home movie

Jun 24, 2016Jul 10, 2019MegeLeave a comment

This post is about me and my childhood at first, but I promise that it will lead to a movie – a proper feature, by a director you have heard of, with an interesting cast. Just bear with me. I grew up in Switzerland, in a small rural town called B. We once did a semi-serious census at school and came up with some 350 inhabitants. That sounds small, but it was just big enough to grow up in. The only two claims to fame are that 1979 movie and a H. R. Giger exhibition in 1986. Both caused a small scandal.