The Self Maintenance Resource Center is a living archive of personal, creative, and intellectual inspiration for artists.
Author Archives: Eileen G'Sell
Eileen G'Sell is a regular contributor to Salon, VICE, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. In 2019 she was nominated for the Rabkin prize in arts journalism. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Posted inFilm
A Coming-of-Age Film That Sidesteps Cliché
Ena Sendijarević’s debut feature, Take Me Somewhere Nice, follows a young Bosnian refugee as she sets off to visit a native country she no longer knows.
Posted inArt
The Darker Side of Keith Haring
The exhibition “Keith Haring: Radiant Gambit” presents a more complicated — and certainly more interesting — take on an artist best known for his zippy visuals.
Posted inFilm
The Art of Looking at, and With, Animals
Gunda and Stray reveal how difficult it is not to romanticize the lives of other animals.
Posted inFilm
In Sound of Metal, There Are No Small Sufferings
Darius Marder’s Oscar-nominated film is less about the Deaf community than about the process of losing a sense inextricably tied to one’s identity.
Posted inFilm
The Intoxicating Tilda Swinton Masters Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language film, The Human Voice, offers heady pathos and sumptuous visuals in equal excess.
Posted inFilm
A Film That Tests Assumptions About Race, Rape, and Power
“Test Pattern” chronicles a biracial courtship and coupledom as a means of probing larger power asymmetries.
Posted inFilm
9to5 Strikes at a Missing Piece of Feminist History
In the late 1970s and early ’80s, women office workers banded together in a labor movement that sprouted up in 25 cities across the country.
Posted inFilm
Two Dramas Plumb the Depths of Women’s Midlife Chaos
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Time and My Little Sister are complicated films about complicated people.
Posted inFilm
Pieces of a Woman Falls to Pieces
What begins as a trenchant exploration of losing a child becomes a Lifetime-esque affair that strays so sharply from a mother’s grief that it feels a bit like a betrayal.
Posted inFilm
When Class Conflict Met Queer Romance
Ammonite tells a 19th-century love story that prompts less a tingle through the loins than a chill down the spine.
Posted inArt
A David Wojnarowicz Documentary Honors the Gritty, Glorious Chaos of His Life
In Wojnarowicz’s work, as in his life, testing the limits of artistic categories and systemic and institutional power was central to his impassioned vision.