With her devotion to cats and heart-shaped everything, Varda personified adorably unconventional thinking — without apology or apparent self-consciousness.
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 inArt
The Quiet Dignity of Peter Hujar
Hujar wrote that his portrait subjects were “those who push themselves to any extreme” and those who “cling to the freedom to be themselves.”
Posted inArt
The Power and Limits of Ai Weiwei’s Irreverence
While his political commitment comes through in many works, it’s hard to square talk of “revolution” with Ai Weiwei’s staggering mainstream US success.
Posted inArt
Dora Maar, More than a Surrealist Muse
The Centre Pompidou’s Dora Maar honors Picasso’s famous muse for the pivotal part she clearly, and often daringly, played in the establishment of the European avant-garde.
Posted inFilm
Reveling in the Languor of David Hockney’s World
A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan’s 1974 documentary on Hockney’s circle, basks in the full-frontal, day-to-day details of their tightly interwoven emotional lives.
Posted inFilm
Juliette Binoche Offers a Tantalizing Performance in Her Two Latest Films
In both High Life and Non-Fiction, Binoche is a temptress equally tender and intimidating.
Posted inFilm
The Tender Turns of the Crime Drama Dogman
Balancing verité grit with sometimes-howling humor, Matteo Garrone’s new movie is subtler than what viewers might anticipate.
Posted inFilm
The Origins of the Colombian Drug Trade Told Through an Indigenous Family’s Eyes
The female-forward characters and the matrilineal Wayúu tribe the movie orbits have gone surprisingly under-explored by film critics.
Posted inArt
Virginia Lee Montgomery’s Abject Whimsy
Virginia Lee Montgomery toys with the psychic space in which abjection is gendered, playfully prodding erotic hierarchies.
Posted inArt
Kehinde Wiley’s Painted Elegies for Ferguson
The subjects of Wiley’s Ferguson paintings launch a vibrant dialogue between the canvas of the painting and the canvas of the body.
Posted inFilm
Two Feminist Directors Who Exposed the Trials of Working Class Women
While the female protagonists in Barbara Loden’s Wanda and Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens may be lost — and legitimately poor — the one thing they are not is self-pitying.
Posted inArt
Mona Hatoum’s Psychological Surgery
While artist’s career has consistently invited interpretation based in institutional critique and real-world tumult, it is equally constructive to consider her work from a psychological, rather than political, vantage.