Art has always demanded a myth about its own making. We rarely encounter a work in isolation; whether it's a painting, a symphony, a film.. It arrives to us already wrapped in a story about how to came to exist, and the story, like it or not, shapes how we're allowed to receive the work itself. We ask not just:

"Is this good?" but "What did it take?".

The myth of origin becomes part of the object; it's very hard, almost impossible, to for example watch Apocalypse Now (1979) without seeing the jungle it was shot in, hearing about the heart attack, the typhoon, the years of re-editing. The making has become inseparable from the made.

Somewhere along the way, that demand for an origin storycurdled into something more specific, a belief that greatness requires ruin, that a masterpiece is proof of what its creator was willing to destroy to make it. The starving painter, the composer who alienates everyone he loves, the novelist who disappears and spirals into his work for decades.

Cinema has built an entire aesthetic vocabulary around suffering as authentication. If it didn't cost the artist something, we're inclined to suspect it wasn't real art at all.

A clear antithesis and rebuttal to that vocabulary is none other than the late David Lynch. With a decorated and celebrated artistic portfolio and filmography, Lynch spent decades publicly rejecting the idea that torment and suffering producebetter work, describing suffering as a hinderance to creativity rather than its fuel, and crediting the clarity behind his most singular films to a disciplined inner calm rather than chaos. He was no less controlling, exacting, or singular in his authorship than the directors examined below, but his philosophy was the polar opposite: The wreckage was never needed. Spirituality, collaboration, and enjoying the process does not rob of the product's value or meaning, but adds to it and magnifies it.

The Wild at Hearts director was more or less alone in this stance where he was in Hollywood. If we observe closely, we can see that it not only inherited this ruin-myth but built an entire new stage for it: Bigger budgets to burn, bigger crew to run into the ground, bigger stories to tell about the making of the making of the film. Along with that came a critical apparatus for deciding, after the fact, whose destruction counts as sacrifice and whose counts as collateral damage.

The same obsessive uncompromising conduct that gets one director canonized gets another's career quietly foreclosed.

So what makes some disasters legible as genius, and when does a studio or audience draw the line between that and immorality?

Hitchcock is perhaps the clearest case of the myth doing its protective work. His treatment of actresses on set, the control, the manipulation, the psychological cost extracted in pursuit of a performance, has been public record for decades, and yet it rarely appears in critical writing as a stain on the work. It appears as method. The “Hitchcock blonde” becomes a genre convention rather than a pattern; his need for total command over a performer’s fear or discomfort becomes evidence of his genius for suspense, not evidence or proof of malice. The industry didn’t just tolerate this, it built a critical vocabulary that could absorb it, one where the director’s cruelty and the film’s brilliance are treated as the same fact, told twice.

Welles complicates the pattern, because his ruin reads differently, not as control exercised over others, but as a kind of self-destruction the industry never quite forgave him for. Citizen Kane secured the myth of genius early; everything after seemed to spend it. Studios recut his films, funding collapsed around him, and the story that got told wasn’t one of an artist being failed by the industry, but of an artist too undisciplined, too grandiose, too much to be trusted with resources. The same excess that would later be framed as visionary in others read, in Welles, as a cautionary tale. His disasters were never legible as genius in the moment, only retroactively, once the work could be safely reappraised without anyone having to bankroll the next one.

Coppola sits closest to the myth’s purest form, the one where the wreckage is the marketing. Apocalypse Now‘s making has become as canonical as the film itself: the heart attack, the typhoon, the years lost to re-editing, all folded into the legend rather than kept separate from it. Unlike Welles, Coppola was never punished for the excess, he was funded for it repeatedly, because the industry had already decided in advance that this particular kind of collapse would read as vision rather than failure. The difference isn’t the scale of the disaster. Hitchcock’s control, Welles’s undisciplined grandeur, and Coppola’s self-financed ruin are, structurally, the same gamble.

What changes is who the industry had already agreed to forgive before the cameras rolled.

But it wasn’t sustainable, so Hollywood does what it does best: contain.

It wasn’t a moral correction so much as a structural one. Franchise economics don’t tolerate a single author’s collapse; Intellectual Property has to survive the person who made it, which means the person is never allowed to become load-bearing enough to bring the whole thing down with them.

The “difficult genius” needed a system willing to treat one man’s excess as the price of admission. That system, bloated, unaccountable, built on trust extended upward rather than downward, is largely gone, replaced by one engineered specifically to prevent any single director from ever having that much unsupervised room to fail.

What’s left is a strange inversion: the ruin-myth still gets told about Hitchcock, Welles, and Coppola, retroactively, endlessly, religiously, but it can no longer be produced. The industry façades it as a developped conscience but look just below the thin mask and it reveals itself to be risk management. The obsessed filmmaker’s legacy survives as mere legend now. An artifact of an industry it would be structurally impossible to rebuild today.

If the old auteur earned his myth through self-destructive, the new one earns it through control. Not over actors or budgets in the old, unaccountable sense, but over process itself. Directors like Denis Villeneuve, Chloé Zhao, or Bong Joon-ho are no less singular in vision than Welles or Coppola, but the stories told about them center on discipline, meticulous pre-visualization, collaborative trust; the Lynch(ish) model, not the Coppola one. The industry now rewards the appearance of control as evidence of genius, where it once rewarded the appearance and actual existence of chaos. This isn’t proof that today’s directors are better people than their predecessors, only that the system no longer has room to canonize the ones who aren’t. The obsessed filmmaker hasn’t disappeared. He’s been boxed in and handed a code of conduct, and what’s left to ask is whether genius was ever the thing being protected, or just the excuse.

Note: all ideas, structure, style, and arguments are the author’s intellectual property. AI assistance was only used for proof-reading and fact checks

Image of street reactions of Algerians during the Black Panthers party meeting with Algerian officials in Algiers in 1969.

The first time I encountered Mohamed Amine Benloulou, he was seated at the back of a packed conference room at the Algiers International Film Festival, listening with studied patience as the panel around him, presided over by Ahmed Bedjaoui, the dean of Algerian film scholarship, and graced by the legendary presence of Elaine Mokhtefi now in her nineties and still the sharpest intelligence in any room she enters. I had put a question to Mokhtefi about how Western cinema has come to portray the revolutionary: a pattern visible across a succession of recent productions, a tendency to frame radical struggle as spectacle, to aestheticise resistance while quietly emptying it of its politics.The conference closed. And as the room began to thin, a young man appeared and introduced himself, quietly, almost diffidently, as someone who had been thinking about exactly that question for some time. That was Benloulou. , it turned out, he was the one with the most at stake in the answer.

Benloulou’s short film documentary, The Black Panthers of Algeria: A Story of Struggle in the Land of Revolutions (2023), had screened earlier that week in the festival’s documentary competition; a taut twenty-seven minutes reconstructing Algeria’s extraordinary function as the Mecca of the global revolutionary left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The film traces the arc of the Black Panther Party’s exile in Algiers: their arrival in the city that Amilcar Cabral once called the destination of every liberation movement on earth, their establishment of an International Section headquarters in the Casbah, and the ideological reverberations their presence sent across decades of African-American art, from Nina Simone to Spike Lee. It is meticulous, politically assured, and formally lucid, a debut that announces a filmmaker who thinks in long historical time.

Months later, we spoke at length over a call, and it became clear that this historical sense was not acquired in lecture halls alone. It was learned, first, in a very different kind of school.

A Camcorder and a Square

Benloulou grew up in a city where, as in much of Algeria in the 1990s and early 2000s, cinema had been pushed to the margins of daily life. The civil war of the preceding decade, what Algerians call the décennie noire, the Black Decade, had shattered the country’s cinema infrastructure. Audiences that had once numbered forty million annually had dwindled to a fraction of that. The great tradition inaugurated by Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s generation had been, if not entirely silenced, then seriously interrupted. Into that vacuum, hip-hop culture had moved with extraordinary force.

There was a playground in his hometown where the scene concentrated itself: breakdancers practicing their freezes on concrete, teenagers gathered in circles to trade bars and threading through the crowd. Benloulou was part of that community – not as an artist, but as a witness. “I was always there,” he affirms, “watching how people moved and spoke and expressed things they couldn’t say anywhere else. That world taught me that culture is how people claim space.”

The decisive rupture came when his father placed a camcorder in his hands and told him, simply, to record. What followed was a discovery not just of the image but of the relationship between image and reality — the way the frame could isolate, intensify, and transform what the naked eye overlooked. He found himself pointing the lens at the very scene he had always inhabited, and watching it become something else: a subject, an argument, a world with its own internal logic. It was, by his account, an almost immediate conversion.

Cinema had found him through the street.

When Benloulou arrived at the University of Abdelhamid Ibn Badis in Mostaganem, he carried that street education with him — and found, perhaps unexpectedly, that the institution could meet him halfway. Enrolled in the Master’s programme in Political Science with a specialisation in Diplomacy and International Cooperation, he was part of a department that had begun to take seriously the political dimensions of popular culture. It was there that he encountered Dr. Aber Hafida, a researcher whose own master’s thesis القيم السياسية في أغنية الراب الجزائرية: لطفي دوبل كانون نموذجا (”Political Values in Algerian Rap Music: Lotfi Double Kanon as a Case Study”) had already staked out that territory with rigour. Sitting on the jury that would examine Benloulou’s own work, she was among those who understood what he was doing and why it mattered.

The thesis Benloulou produced, under the supervision of Dr. Abssir Ahmed Taleb, was titled الدبلوماسية الثقافية الأمريكية: ثقافة الهيب هوب نموذجاً; “American Cultural Diplomacy: Hip-Hop Culture as a Model.” Completed in the 2017–2018 academic year and available through the university’s digital library, it reframed hip-hop not as a youth subculture passively received from the United States, but as a deliberate instrument of systemic defiance and African cultural expression; a vehicle by which values, aesthetics, and political grammar were transmitted across borders, adopted, adapted, and sometimes resisted in the countries they reached.

It is not difficult to trace the line from that thesis to The Black Panthers of Algeria (2023). Both are preoccupied with the same underlying question: how do cultures of resistance travel, and what do they become when they land in new soil? Hip-hop , born in the Bronx from the wreckage of deindustrialization, the welfare state’s retreat, and the afterlives of the civil rights movement, arrived in Algeria and found a country whose own population knew something about structural abandonment and the urgency of self-expression in hostile conditions. The Panthers had made a similar crossing, in the opposite direction, a generation earlier. Algeria had been, for them, not merely a refuge but a laboratory.

Algiers, the Mecca

When I asked Benloulou how one approaches so dense a historical context — Algeria as the Mecca of revolutions, a country that housed the Black Panthers, the PLO, the ANC, the PAIGC, that produced Fanon and screened La Bataille d’Alger (1966) as a revolutionary training manual — his answer was immediate and telling. He had done his research cinematically. He had watched everything: Black KKK, The Last Messiah, Detroit, every documentary on the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers. But watching, he said, produced a persistent unease. “The question was always: where is the Algerian story? Where is the Algerian perspective?” The existing films spoke about Algeria, spoke through it, but rarely from within it.

His moqaraba, or his approach, was to invert the angle entirely: not to ask what the Black Panthers meant for America, but to ask how Algeria itself saw and experienced their presence. It is, as he acknowledged, a risky thing to do. To claim the Algerian point of view on a history that has been largely narrated from the outside — and largely narrated in English, in French, by American and European scholars — is to take on a burden of representation that a twenty-seven-minute short documentary can only partially discharge.

But Benloulou frames the risk as an ethical necessity. Fanon is central here: Algeria, in Mohamed’s reading, did not merely host the Panthers, it provided the philosophical and spatial conditions for a whole ecology of liberation. Les Damnés de la Terre, the vast space Algeria created for political and activist collaboration, the Palestinian liberation movement, the Panthers, the African liberation movements, the foreshadowings embedded in Algeria’s own revolutionary history: all of this, he argues, has been present and largely unremarked. His film is an act of remarking.

The cast of voices he assembles to do this work is not incidental; each brings a distinct layer. Mokhtefi supplies living memory: she was there, in the backstreet hotel, on the other side of the door when Cleaver arrived. Nabil Djedouani – director, archivist, and founder of the Archives Numériques du Cinéma Algérien – provides the film’s archaeological conscience, surfacing footage that institutional neglect has quietly buried. Kamel Bouchama, writer and diplomat, speaks to the formal solidarity Algeria extended to liberation movements across the continent.

Additionally, Dr. Samir Meghelli, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and author of the landmark essay “From Harlem to Algiers,” offers the long scholarly view. What makes his presence feel less like commentary and more like dialogue is that Meghelli, too, has spent years working at the intersection of hip-hop and transnational Black politics — he and Benloulou have arrived at the same crossroads from very different directions, and the film is richer for the convergence.

The Puzzle

Aesthetically, the film is built on two foundations: talking-head interviews and archival footage. It is a classical documentary grammar, and Benloulou chose it deliberately — but the choices made within that grammar are where his authorship shows. He told me that it was his conversations with Meghelli, and his immersion in Mokhtefi’s book, that first gave him a sense of how the story should move: how it begins, where it ends, what it needs to pass through to get there. The interviews themselves became a method of discovery. “Listening to the tales,” he said, “made me find more.” Each sitting with a contributor opened new corridors he had not anticipated.

What he did not anticipate was the difficulty of the edit. He worked with a Jordanian editor, and at a certain point — the film assembled, the material all present — they stopped. A full month passed without a cut. They were stuck not for lack of material but for excess of it: the problem was one of architecture, of finding the sequence that would make a dense, layered history feel not like a lecture but like a story. “We were trying to figure out how to fix the puzzle,” he said. The solution, when it came, was an act of restraint.

Rather than reaching for complexity, or the associative, elliptical structures that documentary filmmakers sometimes use to signal seriousness, Benloulou opted for clarity. A simple, digestible linearity. His reasoning was explicit, and worth dwelling on: the story itself is sacred, and its sacredness lies partly in how few people know it. To dress it in formal difficulty would be to risk losing the very audience that most needs to hear it. The film’s accessibility is not a concession, it is a political choice.

The climate in which Benloulou and his team made the film is not a comfortable one. Algeria’s cinema infrastructure remains fragile, state funding precarious, and the legislative framework governing what films can be made and shown has grown more restrictive rather than less. Directors of his generation: self-produced, working with small crews of true believers, navigating festivals abroad where their work can breathe more freely and operate in conditions that reward commitment above all else.

What strikes one, speaking to Benloulou at length, is that he carries none of this as burden. The history is alive for him in the way that music is alive, as repertoire: something to be learned and played and rearranged. He came to it through a square, a camcorder, and an academic world embodied in researchers like Dr. Aber Hafida that had the intellectual courage to take the Algerian hip-hop scene as a serious popular movement. He is now making films that show Algerian history in all its revolutionary complexity.

In a country whose modern cinema has so often been asked to speak only of the war of independence, and a world that has too often reduced Algeria to that single chapter, this feels like something worth watching.

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We thank Mohamed Amine Benloulou for his generosity and patience across several hours of conversation. His thesis, الدبلوماسية الثقافية الأمريكية: ثقافة الهيب هوب نموذجاً, is available through the digital library of the University of Abdelhamid Ibn Badis, Mostaganem.

Further Reading

Elaine Mokhtefi, Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers. Verso Books, 2018.

Samir Meghelli, “From Harlem to Algiers: Transnational Solidarities Between the African American Freedom Movement and Algeria, 1962–1978.” In Black Routes to Islam, ed. Manning Marable and Hishaam Aidi. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Ahmed Bedjaoui, Cinema and the Algerian War of Independence: Culture, Politics, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Ahmed Bedjaoui & Nabil Boudraa, Algerian Cinema in Forty Five Lessons: Art, Politics and Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.

At first glance, Sinners appears to deliver exactly what such excitement promises. Its opening is strikingly confident: a clearly defined universe, a polished aesthetic sensibility, and the promise of a film where narrative and musical rhythm intertwine. The gallery of characters is immediately engaging, the various narrative threads gradually take shape, and a latent tension begins to settle over the story.

Visually, the film is undeniably compelling. Coogler’s direction stands out in a landscape where large Hollywood productions rarely take risks with their mise-en-scène. Supported by elegant cinematography and inventive framing, Sinners offers a series of memorable images that linger long after the scene has ended. This visual ambition alone makes the film noteworthy within the contemporary blockbuster landscape.

Set in October 1932, the narrative also introduces an intriguing political dimension. The film portrays the brutal reality of racial segregation in the United States, embodied in particular by the violence associated with the Ku Klux Klan. The story periodically shifts into horror and even monster-movie territory. Despite some unnecessary jump scares and fairly obvious genre inspirations—echoes of Get Out are hard to miss—the supernatural framework becomes a metaphor for racial oppression. The film literalizes the idea of exploitation: white characters vampirize Black bodies and culture.

From this political premise emerges what is arguably the film’s greatest strength: its music. Blues melodies constantly hover in the background, functioning as a symbol of cultural resistance and as a reminder of the historical injustices faced by Black communities. The score both amplifies the film’s supernatural undertones and builds a slow, palpable anxiety throughout the narrative. When the end credits reveal the music to be composed by Ludwig Göransson, the effectiveness of the soundtrack suddenly feels inevitable.

This connection between music, spirituality, and narrative also intersects with the film’s engagement with Hoodoo. Often misunderstood or conflated with traditions such as Vodou, Hoodoo developed in the American South as a system of African diasporic folk spirituality practiced largely within Black communities. Rather than an organized religion, it functions as a body of knowledge passed through generations, combining African cosmologies, Biblical symbolism, herbal medicine, and ritual practice. In Hoodoo, the material and spiritual worlds constantly interact. Objects, spaces, and gestures carry power; ritual actions can influence protection, justice, healing, or love.

Sinners attempts to translate this spiritual system into cinematic form. Crossroads imagery, ritual objects, candlelit interiors, and charged musical gatherings evoke a cosmology in which the visible world is only one layer of reality. Music, particularly the blues, begins to function almost as an invocation—something capable of opening a channel between the living community and forces that linger beyond ordinary perception.

Yet the difficulty of representing such a tradition on screen becomes clearer when one considers earlier works that approached similar spiritual territory. Take Eve’s Bayou (1997) as an example: director Kasi Lemmons situates Hoodoo within the intimate rhythms of everyday life rather than within spectacle. The film treats spiritual knowledge not as exotic imagery but as something embedded in memory, family dynamics, and community storytelling. Visions, prophetic dreams, and ancestral presences appear quietly, almost ambiguously, never fully separated from the emotional lives of the characters. In doing so, Eve’s Bayou succeeds precisely where many contemporary films struggle: it allows Black spiritualism to remain partially mysterious, refusing the impulse to fully expose or rationalize it.

For a moment, the film seems on the verge of achieving that, achieving something remarkable. The slow accumulation of tension, combined with the hypnotic power of its musical sequences, promises a sensory and spiritual crescendo. This promise culminates in what may be the film’s most extraordinary scene: a trance-like musical sequence executed in a virtuosic long take. The spatialization of sound inside the theater transforms the moment into something close to a collective hallucination. It is hypnotic, exhilarating, and arguably one of the most memorable cinematic sequences of the year.

And yet, paradoxically, this moment also marks the beginning of the film’s unraveling.

After reaching this peak, the narrative momentum falters. The film’s first hour had already been noticeably talkative, delaying the sensory explosion it seemed to promise. Once the long-awaited sequence arrives, however, the story struggles to maintain its intensity. The pacing becomes increasingly uneven, weighed down by extended dialogue scenes that drain the narrative of energy. Even the most engaging acting performances from the cast looked and felt slightly off, as if they were trying to compensate for the lack of material and void within the script.

More frustratingly, the film begins to lose clarity about what it wants to be. The early political tension and carefully constructed atmosphere gradually dissolve into a more conventional spectacle. The mystical world hinted at throughout the first half, rich with folklore and ancestral symbolism, remains largely unexplored. Aside from a brief exposition scene and a few striking design choices, the film never truly develops the mythological universe it gestures toward.

This superficiality becomes particularly noticeable when the narrative shifts toward action. The final act abandons much of the slow-burn tension and spiritual ambiguity that initially defined the film. Instead, the story pivots toward a barrage of aggressive action sequences centered on the dual performance of Michael B. Jordan. What follows is a series of explosive confrontations that feel disconnected from the film’s earlier ambitions.

Taken in isolation, these scenes might have worked perfectly well as blockbuster spectacle. But within the context of a film that initially promised a subtle and politically charged exploration of culture, spirituality, and oppression, the shift feels abrupt and strangely reductive.

The irony is that flashes of the film’s original brilliance continue to appear even in its weaker moments. Coogler’s visual instincts remain sharp, and the film occasionally embraces a kind of violent exuberance rarely permitted in studio productions of this scale. One senses, throughout the film, the outline of a far more cohesive work struggling to emerge.

Even the extended post-credit sequence—nearly ten minutes long—reflects this structural confusion. While it offers the welcome presence of blues legend Buddy Guy, the scene ultimately feels like another fragment of an idea that the film never fully integrates into its narrative.

In the end, Sinners becomes a film defined by contradiction. It possesses a powerful musical identity, a striking visual ambition, and a political premise that could have supported a truly singular work within Black cinema. Yet these strengths coexist with a narrative that gradually loses direction, drifting away from the very elements that initially made it so compelling

Like the characters it portrays, the film seems to lose its way — descending into a narrative labyrinth where promising ideas remain tantalizingly out of reach.

Editor-in-Chief of Pulses of Ink

If we run it back, it’s Bible, Milton, Shelley, Del Toro. Quite the journey and history we have here as audience: An adaptation of another one of another of a sacred text.

We are not witnessing a series of adaptations so much as a progressive re-orientation of the Fall itself. Each retelling inherits the previous one’s symbolic architecture while quietly displacing its moral center. What begins as sacred narrative becomes ethical inquiry on divine fracture; what was once divine necessity mutates into relational failure.

In Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), the Fall is less an explosion than a withdrawal. Authority of the creator remains intact; what dissolves is the intimacy. Eden is not destroyed, but is simply retracted, quietly pulled from beneath the feet of those who transgress. For John Milton this withdrawal is neither ambiguous nor tragic in a modern sense. Paradise is lost only by necessity, not by cruelty, a consequence of an action.

The Fall operates within a Christian teleology in which divine justice and divine love are ultimately aligned, even when they appear severe. Suffering is corrective; exile is the precondition for redemption.

Guillermo del Toro’s lens fractures this certainty. Reading Paradise Lost through a post-secular, Shelleyan inheritance, he detaches the Fall from salvation history and repositions it as an ethical wound rather than a theological “necessity”. In this framework—shaped as much by Shelley as by Milton—creation is not redeemed by obedience, nor is authority softened by promise. What remains after the earthly descent is not hope deferred but intimacy denied. Love is not restored through submission.

Where Milton’s God withdraws Eden to preserve cosmic order, del Toro echoing The Modern Prometheus writer, asks what is destroyed when creation is abandoned by its maker. The Fall, in this reading, is not humanity’s crime against God but God’s silence toward the created. Paradise is not lost because humans disobeyed, but because authority chose distance over relation.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is haunted by this un-Miltonian structure, and this latest adaption, with Guillermo del Toro in the director’s chair, beautifully translates it into cinematic language. The film, although studded with a few of the most recognizable faces in Hollywood, succeeds in turning away from a spectacle it could’ve easily fallen into, Producing a dramaturgy worthy of a biblical story written as an epic poem from Satan’s perspective (and yes that’s a moutful).

This adaptation is special as it lingers in the aftermath of creation rather than the origin, in its undivine silences. In del Toro’s cinema, this withdrawal is irrevocable: no promised redemption, no eschatological repair. So the act of animation (creation) occurs, and then the camera stays. What matters is not the miracle itself, but what follows when the miracle has no language for care or nurture.

Victor Frankenstein’s response to the being he animates is immediate and visceral. It is not fear alone that overtakes him, but anger: an anger registered in distance, in recoil, in the refusal to remain in the same frame. The Creature’s existence becomes intolerable, not because it is evil, but because it persists, it wants to survive, because it moves, in imperfection, and because it looks back. Like the biblical God confronting a disobedient humanity, Victor encounters autonomy as an affront. Authority, when reflected back at itself, when asked for guidance, curdles into fury.

The Creature understands this relation instinctively. He does not address Victor as a man among men, but as a position: creator. Victor’s name dissolves into function. Like Milton’s God, he becomes maker, judge, origin, yet only partially. He creates but he does not save. He assumes the prerogative of divinity while refusing its burden. Power remains intact but only by name “Victor., Victor.. Victor”, grace does not.

To be made by a creator who will not redeem you is already to be condemned.

Before this refusal, the Creature exists in a state that feels almost prelapsarian. Del Toro films him in thresholds and margins, observing before acting, absorbing the human world through texture and sound rather than law. All in silence.

Elizabeth appears where that silence settles. Her presence shifts the film’s moral center. She does not echo Eve, nor does she orbit Victor’s ambition. Instead, she occupies the space he vacates. Her insistence on the creature’s original purity reframes the entire narrative: She is unlike the original image of a tempted scorned subordinate to the “men” around her. She is a saviour, a complex feminist spin you would or wouldn’t expect Del Toro.

Where Victor refuses proximity, she remains within it. Her gaze neither measures nor corrects the Creature; it recognizes him. Del Toro treats this recognition as consequential rather than sentimental, the first moment in which the Creature exists without being reduced to a problem or a consequence.

Modern Eve’s force lies in her rejection of hierarchy. She never assumes the posture of origin or judgment. Victor claims the role of creator while evading its responsibility; Elizabeth claims nothing, and in doing so reveals the limits of his power. Animation may begin life, but companionship sustains it. The film locates its ethical gravity there.

By centering Elizabeth, Del Toro redirects the lineage we trace— from scripture through Milton to Shelley— away from fear of divine fury, divine punishment and toward what is earthly and worldly. Elizabeth stands as evidence that another mode of creation was always available, one rooted in presence and love rather than control.

The tragedy settles there for the director. The Creature’s suffering begins in the moment his maker turns away. Love’s insistence however, quiet and gentle it is, suggests a different definition of creation: one measured not by origin, but by the willingness to remain, and to sacrifice.. and this latest adaptation of the tale captures it with remarkable cinematic poetry.

Editor-in-Chief of Pulses of Ink

There are moments in a nation’s history that refuse to settle into the past, not because they are constantly spoken of, but because they are so carefully avoided. In Algeria, the 1990s, grimly and somberly referred to as the Black Decade, remain one such unresolved temporal wound. It was a period marked by widespread violence, ideological fracture, and the collapse of everyday certainties, when fear seeped into private spaces and the thin distinction between public and intimate terror all but disappeared. Long after the official end of the conflict, its residue persists: in silences passed down through families, in unspoken anxieties, in the ways bodies remember what language struggles to articulate. The Black Decade did not simply interrupt Algerian life; it reconfigured the emotional grammar through which Algerians learned to live.

What makes this period particularly difficult to confront is not only the scale of violence, but its intimacy. The war did not take place on distant fronts but unfolded in neighborhoods, homes, schools, and places of worship. It infiltrated domestic routines and spiritual practices, producing a constant negotiation between belief, fear, and survival. For many, no, all Algerians, the decade cultivated a fractured relationship with both the visible and the invisible: death was omnipresent yet rarely explained; authority was asserted yet deeply unstable, untrustworthy; faith was both refuge and tyranny/site of suspicion. Trauma, under such conditions, could not always be named as trauma. Instead, it embedded itself in ritual, superstition, rumor, and embodied memory, circulating quietly rather than erupting into open testimony.

In the decades that followed, Algeria’s cultural production has struggled with how or whether to approach this inheritance. Official narratives often favor closure, reconciliation, or selective remembrance, while personal accounts remain fragmented, incomplete, and frequently displaced into metaphor. Cinema, in particular, has oscillated between direct realism and cautious avoidance, aware that representing the Black Decade is never a neutral act. To depict it is to reopen wounds; to ignore it is to allow those wounds to fester unexamined. As a result, many filmmakers have turned to oblique forms of storytelling, where history appears not as a documented sequence of events but as an atmosphere reigning on the story, felt rather than explained, haunting, never to be properly resolved.

It is within this uneasy terrain that Roqia emerges as an impressive intervention. Rather than approaching the Black Decade through the familiar language of political drama or social realism, the film mobilizes the aesthetics of horror, possession, and the “au-dela”, drawing on spiritual and folkloric registers deeply embedded in Algerian society. The choice is significant: exorcism, by its very nature, presupposes an invasion, a foreign presence or parasitical entity lodged within the body that must be named and expelled. In a post-conflict context where trauma has rarely been publicly processed, such a metaphor becomes more than symbolic: it is an artist’s diagnostic.

By situating collective suffering within the framework of the supernatural, the film gestures toward what conventional historical narratives cannot fully capture: the persistence of fear beyond its original cause, the way violence continues to inhabit bodies long after the guns have fallen silent. Roqia does not simply recall the Black Decade; it suggests that the nation remains possessed by it, struggling to purge something that has never been properly acknowledged. In doing so, the film invites a reconsideration of how Algerian cinema can function not only as a site of representation, but as a space where suppressed memories resurface, and where the act of storytelling itself becomes a tentative form of exorcism.

Yanis Koussim successfully confronts Algerian collective trauma through cinematic catharsis, bending horror into a language for what history has rendered unspeakable.

Director and writer Yanis Koussim, is the creative behind Roqia. A Sétif-born filmmaker whose career has threaded through shorts and collaborative projects before culminating in this feature debut. Koussim studied at La Fémis in Paris and, after years of crafting short narratives and documentary work, chose the horror genre as the vessel for his first full-length film, not out of genre allegiance, but because the story he found himself writing demanded it. As he has said in interviews, having lived through Algeria’s 1990s turmoil firsthand, horror became the only filmic language capable of channeling the lived terror of that era into something palpable and expressive rather than merely didactic.

Production on Roqia brought together a mix of Algerian and international talent. The cinematography by Jean-Marie Delorme imbues the film with a visual language that oscillates between stark realism and creeping unease, often staging its most intense moments in close, claustrophobic interiors that feel as much psychological as physical. The editing by Maxime Pozzi-Garcia and Sarah Zaanoun stitches together parallel timelines one set in the turbulent early 1990s, the other in the present, in a way that blurs the borders between memory and hallucination parallel to past violence and present dread.

After its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week in 2025, Roqia began its journey through the international festival circuit, garnering attention in Algeria, Europe and beyond. The film was subsequently acquired for global distribution by the French company Alpha Violet, with U.S. rights picked up by Watermelon Pictures, a notable achievement for a genre work emerging from a film culture still rebuilding itself after decades of disruption.

At its narrative core, the film weaves together three strands that are at once supernatural and deeply anchored in lived reality. One thread follows an ageing raqi (an Islamic healer specializing in exorcism) whose struggle with Alzheimer’s casts doubt on his grip over the ancient rites he once commanded. Another returns to 1992, where Ahmed, severely injured in a car accident and stripped of his memory, comes home to a world that no longer recognizes him, a striking metaphor for the societal disorientation wrought by the civil war.

The film’s third strand follows a young woman whose survival depends on resisting a violent distortion of religious interpretation. These overlapping arcs allow the story to interrogate memory, identity and fear, while using the mechanics of possession, whispers, unseen presences, the fear of what lies beneath familiar surfaces, to dramatize collective psychological wounds.

Visually and thematically, Roqia bears comparison to the blueprint of the genre, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. The resemblance is not through literal replication of set-pieces, but in how it stages possession as a rupture of the self, an invasion that upends ordinary life and exposes its fragilities. Like William Friedkin’s landmark work from 1973, Koussim’s film doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares so much as a steady erosion of certainties: faith becomes fraught, bodies become vessels for forces beyond comprehension, and the line between spiritual healing and spiritual threat becomes dangerously thin.

Roqia is unmistakably rooted in Algerian cultural and historical soil. Where The Exorcist drew on Christian iconography and Cold War anxieties, Roqia draws on practices of roqia within Islam, rituals familiar in Algerian villages and urban enclaves, where spiritual healing has long coexisted with everyday life. This grounding allows the film to ask not just “what haunts us?” but “how do we make sense of what we’ve endured?”

In Koussim’s hands, the supernatural becomes a lens through which to read the psychological aftermath of the Black Decade.. a trauma that, unlike Hollywood’s fears of demonic possession, is an excerpt of real violence that continue to reverberate.

In the broader context of Algerian cinema, Roqia stands apart. While there have been Algerian films that engage with the 1990s, such as Le Démon au Féminin by Hafsa Zinaï Koudil (1994), which used the narrative of an exorcism to explore social violence and fundamentalism in the same era, these works have typically taken the form of social drama rather than genre cinema. Other films set around or responding to that period, like Moussa Haddar’s Made In (1999), have tended toward thriller or social realism, wrestling with moral dilemmas and societal fractures without the symbolic overlay that Roqia embraces. In this sense, Koussim’s film marks a departure: it builds on Algeria’s cinematic engagement with its past, but does so through a form that is more creatively designed, flushed-out and operating on multiple story-telling strata.

Koussim situates horror around and within the specific contours of Algerian memory and superstition.

The whispers of radicalization

The fear of one’s neighbor

The loss of who you once were

Evil spirits of long gone

A roqia: An exorcism

Rather than offering catharsis or resolution, the film lingers in uncertainty, mirroring the unresolved status of the decade it evokes. What it ultimately stages is not the expulsion of evil, but the exposure of a wound, literally and figuratively, that has never been fully named. By refusing closure, the film resists the temptation to turn trauma into an aesthetic or history into allegory neatly resolved. Instead, it insists on the persistence of haunting, of memory, fear, and belief, all of these as constitutive elements of contemporary Algerian subjectivity.

In this sense, the act of exorcism becomes less a cure than a confrontation: an acknowledgment that what inhabits the present is inseparable from what violently took place in the past.

Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Pulses of Ink

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In 1966, Gillo Pontecorvo titled his film The Battle of Algiers, a definitive phrase, singular and grounded. The word battle in Pontecorvo’s hands was not metaphorical. It referred to a specific place, a historical struggle, and a collective confrontation with clearly articulated stakes. The film unfolds with the discipline of a chronicle rather than the flourish of a spectacle: non-professional actors, neorealist textures, and an almost documentary insistence on process over psychology. Resistance is not personalized, mythologized, or stylized; it is organized, strategic, and brutally constrained by material conditions. The title announces not an emotion, but an event.

Nearly sixty years later, Paul Thomas Anderson offers One Battle After Another, the title immediately signals slippage. Where Pontecorvo names a battle, Anderson names accumulation. The shift from the to one…after another feels not merely linguistic but conceptual. Anderson’s picture is not anchored to a singular historical confrontation; it unfolds in cycles, repetitions, and gestures that never quite coalesce into rupture. Battles occur, but they are indistinct, oddly interchangeable, and strangely unmoored from consequence.

Read side by side, the two titles trace a quiet but telling transformation. The Battle of Algiers asserts clarity: a struggle located in time, space, and political reality. One Battle After Another suggests motion without destination, conflict as rhythm rather than resolution. “Viva la revolution!” but which one? Anderson does not parody Pontecorvo’s certainty; he reframes it. His film occupies a world where the language of confrontation remains, but its grounding has shifted. What once named a decisive encounter now echoes as repetition.

It is within this tension that One Battle After Another must be understood.

Cinema is back — and it’s Paul Thomas Anderson plunging shoulder-deep into political satire, dragging the American revolutionary myth with him. One Battle After Another does not critique power, corruption, or ideology; it interrogates the figure of the revolutionary as it now exists: stripped of clarity, inflated by gesture, and sustained by repetition with no art of war behind it.

Formally, the film moves with manic precision. Dialogue recalling Coen’s The Big Lebowski’s circular deadpan, while pace evoking Scorsese’s After Hours: a single disastrous day spiraling into absurdity. There are traces of Tarantino’s heightened caricature and sleaze, but without glamour or release. Transgression here is not cool; it is exhausting. Bob’s increasingly awful day unfolds less as misfortune than as consequence or a warrior’s karma, each encounter he has revealing another dead end.

But Anderson’s construction of a layered narrative that blends dark humor, pointed allegory, and exaggerated characterization, makes all of it feel right. Bingo! In this universe, everyone is horrible. The ruling elite—an overtly white supremacist government—are grotesque, incompetent, and cruel. A caricature we are quite used to in the latest of the Political film catalogue. But to our surprise: those who oppose them are no saviors. They are quixotic, incoherent, and politically ineffective. This is not balance for its own sake; it is diagnosis. A truly well executed satire.

Anderson’s refusal to moralize a single camp is one of the film’s most striking gestures, particularly in an era saturated with pseudo-comedic civic dramas eager to reassure their audiences. No character exists to absorb virtue on the viewer’s behalf. No position is insulated from scrutiny. The effect is bracing and deeply unfashionable.

The revolutionary is a loser.

From Revolutionary Cinema to Revolutionary Gesture

Situating One Battle After Another within the longer history of political cinema clarifies the precision of its intervention.

Early twentieth-century revolutionary filmmaking, from Soviet montage to socialist realism, framed exploitation while still imagining collective struggle (Eisenstein, Vertov). Postwar neorealism shifted focus toward workers and systemic injustice, retaining a belief in historical movement. Even at its bleakest, this cinema remained future-oriented.

The 1970s marked a high point. Political cinema openly confronted capitalism and imperialism (Costa-Gavras, Pontecorvo). Revolution was tragic, costly, and uncertain—but still imaginable.

The erosion begins in the 1980s, as neoliberal logic reshapes narrative priorities. Fredric Jameson famously argued that late capitalism colonizes imagination itself, replacing structural critique with individualized survival (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism).

By the 1990s, satire increasingly replaces confrontation. Elites are mocked, not dismantled. Cynicism becomes the dominant affect.

In the 2010s, this posture solidifies into a recognizable mode: films that offer symbolic revenge, stylized critique, and aestheticized outrage. Mark Fisher’s “capitalist realism” hovers here—the sense that systems are easier to ridicule than to imagine beyond (Capitalist Realism). The revolutionary remains on screen, but increasingly as image rather than agent.

One Battle After Another does not attempt to revive the revolutionary figure. It exposes what has become of him.

The False Revolutionary

At the center of Anderson’s film stands the false revolutionary: a character fluent in the language of resistance but incapable of political rupture. He performs rebellion as gesture. His anger is real, but unmoored. His actions circulate without accumulating force.

This figure is not condemned outright, nor redeemed. He is rendered absurd—lost, sincere, oddly committed, and structurally useless. Anderson’s insight is that ineffectiveness does not negate belief; it often intensifies it. The revolutionary persists not because he threatens power, but because he no longer does.

Crucially, the film does not rehabilitate the state in contrast. Power remains violent, racist, and grotesque. But it does not require elegance to endure—only opposition locked in repetition. The battle continues. Nothing changes.

Lubitsch, Farce, and the Seriousness of Comedy

Anderson’s use of satire places him in dialogue with Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), another film that understood comedy as a tool of precision rather than release. Lubitsch’s portrayal of Nazis as ridiculous did not trivialize fascism; it stripped it of grandeur while leaving its danger intact. Authority, in Lubitsch’s world, survives through performance—and farce reveals the seams.

Similarly, Anderson’s characters operate within layers of role-play and ideological mimicry. Revolutionaries and rulers alike repeat gestures they barely understand. Comedy here is not a safety valve; it is an exposure.

Where much contemporary political cinema offers moral victory, One Battle After Another withholds satisfaction. Its most radical gesture is its exposure of that redundancy. In presenting rebellion as repetition rather than rupture, Anderson does not mock the desire for change, he maps the conditions under which that desire circulates without effect.

From The Battle of Algiers to One Battle After Another, the word battle remains, but its meaning has shifted. What was once a confrontation anchored in history now unfolds as a loop. Anderson’s film does not claim this shift as inevitable, but it renders it unmistakably visible.

One battle simply follows another, and another, and another..

The language remains, weak, yet here.

The outcome however, does not.

Youssef Chahine’s Son of the Nile (1951) is a powerful moral fable that uses the language of early Egyptian realism to explore themes of personal failure, social dislocation, and ethical return. The film follows Hima, a disillusioned young peasant who abandons his rural village for the promises of urban life in Cairo. But the city, far from offering liberation or opportunity, becomes a space of corruption and moral decay. Drawn into criminal circles, Hima is imprisoned and ultimately returns to his village; transformed and repentant, re-rooted in the traditional values he had once rejected.

At its core, Son of the Nile constructs a symbolic and moral opposition between rural and urban life, between rootedness and alienation, honest labor and illusion, communal ethics and individual drift. Hima’s journey is framed as a cautionary tale: his rejection of village life is not merely a personal misstep, but a moral transgression with social consequences. The narrative arc (departure, fall, and return) evokes a parabolic structure drawn from religious and folkloric traditions, where virtue is rewarded and hubris corrected.

The film emerges at a critical juncture in Egyptian cinematic history, when a new wave of socially engaged filmmaking was beginning to define what would later be called the country’s “Golden Age” (spanning roughly from the 1940s to the 1960s). During this period, directors began turning away from escapist genre films toward stories grounded in social reality, class struggle, and moral inquiry. Egyptian realism, influenced by both local narrative forms and international movements like Italian neorealism, became the dominant mode— not just a style, but a political and ethical commitment to representing the lives of ordinary people with seriousness and depth.

Youssef Chahine, still at the beginning of his long and complex career, was a key figure in this shift. Born in Alexandria in 1926 and trained in both Cairo and California, Chahine brought a cosmopolitan sensibility to the realist tradition. Alongside Son of the Nile, early works like Baba Amin (1950) and The Blazing Sun (1954) demonstrate his commitment to socially grounded storytelling, while also hinting at the psychological and political intensity that would come to define his later films. Even in his most didactic moments, his cinema remains attentive to interior conflict, moral ambiguity, and emotional depth.

In Son of the Nile, this depth manifests in the filmmaker’s refusal to caricature the city or reduce Hima to a mere cautionary figure. While the urban landscape is depicted as morally corrosive, it is also rendered as a product of structural forces, poverty, inequality, displacement, rather than simply as a stage for vice. Hima’s fall is tragic not because he is inherently flawed, but because he is unmoored, disconnected from the social and ethical frameworks that once gave his life coherence.

Stylistically, the film exudes the principles of early Egyptian realism: restrained cinematography, classical editing, and a focus on ordinary spaces and lived experience. Yet even within these formal boundaries, Chahine begins to push toward a more expressive cinema, one marked by emotional intensity and a deep engagement with character psychology. The result is a film that is at once socially didactic and humanely nuanced, offering moral clarity without succumbing to simplification.

Yet this moral clarity may also be the film’s limitation. While Son of the Nile presents Hima’s journey as a redemptive return to communal and ethical values, the vision of morality it upholds can feel rigid — even unattainably pure. The village is portrayed not just as a place of origin, but as a moral and imperative ideal to return to. A place untouched by the complexities and contradictions of modern life.

This binary framing where the rural signifies virtue and the urban represents decay risks simplifying the very tensions the film otherwise seeks to explore. By offering a single path to redemption, rooted in traditional values and social reintegration, the film leaves little room for alternative forms of ethical or personal transformation. In doing so, it imposes a kind of moral orthodoxy that may not resonate with viewers living in a more fractured or pluralistic reality.

There is a tension between moral assertion and psychological depth that invites comparison with the films of Yasujirō Ozu, particularly Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953). Both directors humanistically explore the consequences of generational conflict, the impact of urbanization on traditional life, and the emotional cost of social transformation. However, Ozu’s approach is marked by formal minimalism, compositional precision, and emotional restraint. His camera remains still, his moral judgments ambiguous, his tone melancholic. Change, in Ozu’s world, is quiet, inevitable, and tinged with sorrow.

Chahine, by contrast, is more emotionally direct and morally insistent. Son of the Nile does not mourn the erosion of tradition so much as argue for its restoration. Where Ozu presents familial dissolution with gentle resignation, Chahine dramatizes the possibility, and necessity, of return and reaffirmation. His vision of tradition is not passive but active, not nostalgic but corrective. In this sense, his film aligns more closely with the tradition of social-realist moral cinema, echoing, for example, the redemptive arcs found in early Italian neorealism, particularly in a couple of works of Visconti and Rossellini.

Despite their differences, both Ozu and Chahine share a humanist sensibility: a concern with how people live, how they fail, and how they seek meaning in a changing world. Yet while Ozu leaves his characters suspended in quiet ambiguity, Chahine, at least in this early period, offers resolution, perhaps one-dimensional and idealist, but hard-won and ethically charged.

Hollywood, summer of 1975, Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws opened in over 400 theaters at the same time. A very unusual for big studio films at that time, which were usually released slowly in just a few cinemas before gradually expanding nation, then international-wide. Jaws became a huge hit—within 78 days, grossing more money than any other film in U.S. history. The previous record-holder, The Godfather (1972), had only opened on five screens and grew slowly through positive reviews

Jaws had incredible word of mouth, as well as a huge television advertising campaign, which helped build up anticipation and a wave of audience enthusiasm that shocked the film industry. Two years later, George Lucas’s Star Wars came out and became an even bigger success. This confirmed a new era: the summer blockbuster was born.

These movies completely changed how Hollywood operated. Releasing a movie in many theaters all at once became the new standard (this is called a “saturation release”), and summer—rather than the Christmas or winter holiday season—became the main time for releasing big-budget action or adventure films that appealed to a wide audience.

Although some summer blockbusters were praised by critics, the genre as a whole is often looked down upon. Partly this is because the pursuit of quick, massive financial rewards spelled the death of the much-ballyhooed “Hollywood Renaissance” of the early 1970s: that fabled period that saw the big studios supporting richly complex, stylistically adventurous, auteur-driven films, many of which were embraced by audiences.

Back then, directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Roman Polanski made bold and unusual movies that still found success with audiences. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), The Conversation (1974) and Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974) balanced style, substance, and pristine storytelling. innovation. Critics were amazed by the high-quality work coming from Hollywood at that time. But eventually, studios found those kinds of films too risky and unsustainable for a steady and profitable business model.

As summer blockbusters became more popular and profitable, they began to take over Hollywood’s focus. This shift meant that more serious and artistic films got less attention, and critics blamed directors like Spielberg, Lucas, and their progeny.

At first, many of these blockbuster movies were very well made—they had heart, were technically impressive, and were inspired by classic Hollywood directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks: The muses and mentors of the directors of the late 1970s and 1980s who were, after all, the first generation to grow up in a world where pictures with sound were culturally dominant and more accessible to watch on TV. This deeply shaped their style and love for cinema.

However over time, summer movies began to rely more and more on flashy computer-generated effects and loud, dramatic visuals and sound. Aural and visual sensationalism often came at the expense of having a good story or dimensional, well fleshed-out characters.

In addition, a tactic that ensured regular profits, studios started making fewer original movies and focused on remakes, sequels, or films based on themes or stories that were already popular—like older films, TV shows, famous book series (i.e Harry Potter, Twilight and even toys like The Lego Movie)

At present, the summer blockbuster occupies a paradoxical space in Hollywood. On one hand, franchise sequels, superhero films, and branded IP still dominate studio calendars, reflecting an industry cautious about financial risk. The reliance on computer-generated spectacle and recognizable properties continues, though many audiences and critics note fatigue with formulaic storytelling.

Yet, there are countercurrents: independent studios such as A24 and Neon have shown that original, director-driven works can succeed even in summer release windows, and the renewed use of practical effects and large-scale stunts in certain high-profile productions suggests a hunger for authenticity in an era otherwise saturated with digital imagery. Still, the balance between art and commerce that defined the early 1970s seems out of reach—Hollywood’s conditions, and its globalized marketplace, have changed too much for the blockbuster to return to what it once was.

Looking ahead, the future of the summer blockbuster is less a matter of certainty than of possibility. What is next?

Will the integration of AI and emergent digital production techniques transform the aesthetic register of the blockbuster, or merely reinforce its dependence on established formulas? Will the theatrical premiere continue to serve as the privileged site of cinematic spectacle, or will hybrid distribution models further erode the distinction between the cinema and the domestic screen?

And perhaps most crucially: can the summer blockbuster reinvent itself in a manner that restores some measure of the creative audacity once associated with Hollywood’s past, or has that moment of cinematic possibility slipped out of their grasp for good?

1. To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Unlike much of Hitchcock’s work, with its shadows and urban claustrophobia, To Catch a Thief is drenched in Riviera sunlight. Cary Grant, with his immaculate tan and effortless fashion, moves through the landscape like an emblem of postwar elegance. The beach and sea are central: one memorable moment shows him lounging on a boat, seemingly at ease, though suspicion still clings to him.

In another scene, he swims in the glittering Mediterranean alongside Grace Kelly’s Frances Stevens and Brigitte Auber’s Danielle Foussard. What begins as playful splashing and lighthearted competition carries an undertow of tension, the two women circling Grant as if testing his loyalties. The sea is not just backdrop but catalyst, its sparkling expanse amplifying the sense of exposure, its fluidity mirroring the slipperiness of desire and deception. In Hitchcock’s hands, leisure becomes spectacle, glamour becomes disguise, and the Mediterranean itself becomes a stage where charm and danger intermingle.

2. Summer with Monika (Ingmar Bergman, 1953)

Monika and Harry, two restless youths from working-class Stockholm, abandon their gray routines to escape into the Stockholm archipelago, dreaming of love, freedom, and a life beyond responsibility. For a brief summer, they inhabit an idyll of sun, water, and desire. Harriet Andersson’s Monika lies on the rocks by the sea, the salt wind brushing her hair, her body luminous under the Nordic sun.

Bergman lingers on the couple as they stretch across the stones, the sea shimmering endlessly behind them. In close-ups of their faces, we glimpse both intimacy and fracture, their laughter giving way to silences as the cracks in their romance begin to show. The rocky seaside moment has become legendary, not only for its frank sensuality but also for the way Bergman fuses landscape and emotion, making the sea itself a witness to their passion swelling and receding like the tide. The beauty is raw, natural, unadorned: Bergman’s camera turns water and skin into a hymn of youth, while also reminding us that summer, like freedom, cannot last.

3. A Summer’s Tale (Éric Rohmer, 1996)

Gaspard, a shy young man on holiday in Dinard, drifts between three women: Margot, Solène, and Léna, never quite able to decide what he wants. His indecision unfolds against the modest beaches of Brittany, far from the glamour of the Riviera. Rohmer, who loved to film the sea, captures it here with striking simplicity: waves rolling in, tides shifting, light glinting on water.

Part of this simplicity comes from the way he shows the beach as it is, with crowds sunbathing, children playing, and holidaymakers passing by, a lived-in detail that makes the film at once realistic and nostalgic. One of the most delicate moments comes when Gaspard and Margot walk together along the shore at low tide, the vast stretch of wet sand reflecting the sky as if the horizon itself had folded in two. Their conversation is tentative, meandering like the tide, a fragile intimacy suspended between friendship and something more. The sea becomes a mirror of Gaspard’s uncertain heart, its currents echoing his wavering affections. The beauty lies in Rohmer’s patience, his trust in the ordinary, the beach is not eternal paradise but a space of passing moods, where friendship, longing, and melancholy leave their faint traces like footprints in the sand.

4. Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960)

Tom Ripley, sent to Italy to retrieve a wealthy playboy, instead becomes intoxicated by the Mediterranean lifestyle and begins plotting to take it for himself. The sea is everywhere in René Clément’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith: decadent, shimmering, yet edged with menace. Alain Delon’s Ripley lounges on a sailboat, his tanned skin and elegance reflected in the turquoise water, a vision of luxury and freedom.

In one unforgettable scene, he swims in the crystalline sea with Philippe, the man he will later betray, the surface play masking the violence that simmers beneath. Just as striking is the image of Ripley stretched out on his stomach on the deck of a small boat, drifting helplessly as the current carries him away. The Mediterranean seems both cradle and accomplice, rocking him gently while hinting at the loss of control that defines his fate. Clément paints beauty with menace: the waves glitter, but they are also the medium that conceals crime, swallowing bodies as easily as secrets. The sea here is not innocent, it is complicit, a siren that seduces even as it bears witness to treachery.

5. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)

Widowed Lucy Muir, played by Gene Tierney, retreats with her daughter to a cottage on the English coast, only to discover it is haunted by the ghost of Captain Daniel Gregg, a rugged sea captain portrayed by Rex Harrison. The sea is central to their strange companionship, shaping the film’s atmosphere as much as its plot.

From her cottage perched high above the surf, Lucy gazes out at the fog-draped horizon, the waves crashing below like an eternal heartbeat. One haunting scene shows her walking the beach alone, the wind and sea spray enveloping her as though carrying the captain’s presence. His very identity is bound to the ocean, commanding yet elusive, and the rhythms of the tide seem to echo his voice. The shore is not warm or idyllic but spectral, a liminal space between the living and the dead. Its beauty lies in atmosphere and longing, the sea breathing with absence, embodying a love that defies time itself.

6. Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008)

On a dazzling Greek island, young Sophie invites three men from her mother’s past to her wedding, hoping to discover which one is her father. The film’s story is carried as much by ABBA’s songs as by the landscape, and the sea becomes inseparable from its exuberance.

The beach is a theatre of joy, where Sophie, Sky, Donna, and her friends break into song at the drop of a hat and where every feeling becomes a celebration. In the number Lay All Your Love on Me, Sophie and Sky roll across the sand before being swept into the water by a laughing, splashing chorus of friends, turning the shoreline into a carnival. Elsewhere, glittering coves and sun-soaked piers frame Donna and her companions as they belt out songs of memory, desire, and sheer silliness, dancing with reckless abandon. The Mediterranean here sparkles like champagne, bubbly, excessive, and impossible to resist. Its beauty lies not in calm contemplation but in pure fun, a euphoric burst of colour, music, and play that turns the island into a holiday dream come true, an ode to youth in all its recklessness and radiance.

7. The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer, 1986)

Rohmer follows Delphine, a young woman drifting through a lonely summer after her holiday plans collapse. She wanders from beach to beach, from Biarritz to Cherbourg to the Atlantic coast, searching for companionship yet unable to shake her solitude. True to Rohmer’s style, the sea is filmed with remarkable simplicity, crowded and ordinary rather than idealized, which makes its presence all the more touching and real. The beaches are not escapes but stages for Delphine’s isolation, as we watch her sit apart from laughing groups or walk the shore alone, the waves underscoring her hesitations and anxieties.

The film builds to one of cinema’s most quietly legendary endings. At sunset, Delphine witnesses the elusive green flash, a natural phenomenon that occurs for only a second as the sun dips below the horizon. It is both scientific and miraculous, the sea momentarily opening into revelation. The beauty lies in this fleeting shimmer, where cinema, nature, and inner life align. For Delphine, who has spent the film caught between despair and indecision, the vision is not just an external marvel but an internal release, a sign that her longing for meaning, love, and connection is not futile. The ocean, which has mirrored her loneliness throughout, suddenly reflects hope. The emotional impact of the moment comes from its delicacy: a tiny, almost invisible occurrence that carries the weight of redemption. It suggests that fulfillment does not arrive with grand gestures but in fragile instants, when one is open enough to see them.

8. L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

Antonioni begins his modernist masterpiece with a boat trip to the Aeolian Islands, where a group of wealthy friends seek leisure by the sea. Anna disappears during a stop on a desolate rocky coast, and her absence becomes the haunting void around which the rest of the story turns. The Mediterranean here is elemental and imposing, with cliffs that cut sharply into the horizon, an endless expanse of water, and a wind that never ceases. The island scene in the beginning becomes the backdrop to everything that follows, so much so that the entire film feels like one long echo of that encounter with the sea. Even when the characters leave the island, its presence lingers, a phantom landscape pressing in on the rest of the story. As Claudia and Sandro search along the rocky shores, the camera lingers on the violent waves crashing against black stone, dwarfing the characters and highlighting their vulnerability

Despite the film’s black and white austerity and its low-contrast tones, the waves remain striking, their movement and force carrying a visceral weight that no lack of color can diminish. The sea is both beautiful and cruel, an eternal backdrop to human uncertainty. Where in other films the coast offers escape or joy, here it exposes emptiness. Antonioni transforms the seascape into a metaphor for disconnection: the characters’ voices are nearly lost in the roar of the tide, their gestures small against the immensity of nature. The beauty lies in this starkness. The Aeolian sea is sublime rather than idyllic, its power overwhelming and indifferent. It is not a setting for romance but for existential reflection. Just as the disappearance remains unresolved, the sea gives no answers. Instead, it embodies the modern condition Antonioni was so drawn to, where alienation, longing, and the fragility of human bonds are set against the vast, unfeeling expanse of the world.

9. Tale of the Three Jewels (Michel Khleifi, 1995)

On the shores of Gaza, Yussef and Aida stand by the sea, its horizon stretching endlessly beyond them. For Yussef, the beach is a frontier, the edge of a world defined by confinement. The waves crash with a rhythm that seems eternal, their persistence mirroring both resistance and yearning. The sea is a freedom shimmering in the distance, and at the same time an unreachable promise, the very shape of exile.

Khleifi binds the sea to Yussef’s dreams. His quest for the legendary three jewels, and with them the fantasy of escape to South America, is a child’s story on the surface, but beneath it lies the collective longing of a people.

Water is the stage where that longing is made visible, where the children’s innocent play collides with the starkness of political reality. To look at the water is to imagine another life, but also to feel the cruelty of its unattainability. The beauty of this scene lies in its contradictions. The beach is filled with youthful tenderness and possibility, yet it is also marked by absence, by the knowledge that crossing is forbidden. Unlike the Mediterranean of Rohmer or Clément, which speaks of romance, leisure, or introspection, Khleifi’s sea is charged with history and struggle. It carries the double weight of hope and impossibility. The horizon becomes a symbol of both resistance and despair, a reminder that Palestinian dreams, luminous as the waves themselves, remain suspended, shimmering, and forever just out of reach.

It is last embers of summertime. The sun lingers long past its welcome, cicadas stitch the air with their endless song, and the beaches breathe with bodies and salt. The days swell, slow, and shimmer, as though time itself has loosened its grip. Cinema has always been drawn to this suspended season—from the seaside flirtations of To Catch a Thief, to the New Wave’s wandering lovers in Pierrot le Fou, to the dusty languor of Malick’s Days of Heaven. Directors have used summer to alter the texture of a film: its pace, its palette, even the way bodies occupy the frame.

In Italian neorealism, the sun bleached streets and fields into moral landscapes; in Hollywood, the “Summer Movie” became its own ritual, a promise of spectacle and escape. But beyond genre or marketing, summer is not a neutral horizon—it is a restless current, bending the rhythm of a story, loosening tongues, tilting the heart toward risk. Watch closely, and you may see it for what it is: a character made of light and breath, of shadows at noon, of moments that cannot survive another season.

Critics have long noted the way seasons in film act as emotional architectures. Winter tightens, enclosing characters in isolation or survival; autumn leans toward nostalgia and decay; spring swells with rebirth. But summer—summer is expansive. It stretches time, loosens moral seams, and invites characters to reveal parts of themselves they might otherwise keep hidden. In great films, summer’s qualities are not passive but structural: it dictates pacing, determines light, and influences behaviour. The season operates almost like a secondary protagonist, with its own arc, temperament, and capacity to change those around it.

In cinema, this becomes prophecy. The season’s cinematic presence often marks the beginning of affairs, revelations, transitions, or farewells. It’s where characters lose themselves or finally come into being. Whether in the languid afternoons of Éric Rohmer’s Pauline à la Plage, the humid teenage longings of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, or the soft melancholy of Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Summer, summer pulses, beyond the plot. It breathes into the camera lens. It locks eyes with the audience. It is not just a setting—it is the axis of desire. The central figure of the picture

What makes Summer so cinematic?

Unlike winter, which constricts and encloses, summer opens up everything. Clothes come off, secrets spill, time slows. Filmmakers use the season to create atmospheres of vulnerability. The natural lighting of summer—bright, soft, golden—exposes characters in emotional and literal ways. Skin glows, sweat shines, and bodies move differently when the heat is pressing in. The season allows stories to meander without urgency, letting revelations happen in glances, in the lazy drift of conversation, in the unplanned afternoon that changes everything.

Eric Rohmer and the Drift of Sunlit Days

For Rohmer, l’été is not simply a calendar date but a state of suspension, a gentle holding pattern where choices are postponed and desire ripens in the shade. His beaches and rural towns are awash with soft wind and chatter, each conversation as meandering as a shoreline walk. In Pauline à la plage (1983), the camera lingers on lazy afternoons where half-truths and small betrayals are carried on the salt air. Sunlight catches on hair, dresses flutter in the breeze, and the sea is always just close enough to blur the edges of thought. In A Summer’s Tale (1996), the protagonist drifts between three women with a mix of earnestness and hesitation, his indecision mirrored by the ebbing tide and long, languorous days. Rohmer’s summers are days where nothing happens—until you realise everything has.

Luca Guadagnino and The Heat of Awakening

In Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017), summer is the lush, almost unbearable ache of being alive for the first time. The northern Italian countryside hums with cicadas, peach trees lean heavy with fruit, and light pours over every stone wall and swimming hole. There’s the scene by the riverbank, where Elio floats on his back, the water carrying him while desire takes root somewhere deep within him. There’s the lazy afternoon where he and Oliver cycle into town, the air shimmering in the heat, each glance between them charged, unfinished. Guadagnino captures the way summer wraps itself around a love affair—not politely, but insistently—pressing heat into skin and memory alike. By the time autumn creeps in, the air cools and the colours fade, and we feel the loss of more than a romance; we feel the end of a world that could only exist in summer.

Yasujiro Ozu and The Quiet Impermanence of Summer

In Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Summer (1951), the season does not shout its presence—it settles in, quietly, like the long afternoons that make you notice the dust in the air. The story of Noriko, a young woman pressed by her family to marry, unfolds under a Japanese summer that is neither idyllic nor oppressive, but inevitable. Shimmering light slips through shoji screens, a breeze stirs the curtains, and the sound of distant children at play reminds us that time moves even when we are still.

Ozu’s summer is one of small hesitations and inevitable change, where the brightness of the day makes each unspoken word more visible. By the film’s end, the season has done what it always does—it has moved on, taking with it a moment in life that will not return.

Summer as Memory and Myth

Summer on screen often arrives already half-remembered. Even in the present tense, it feels like a recollection—blurred at the edges, overheated, and weighted with the knowledge that it will end. Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) captures this perfectly: the golden wheat fields ripple in an eternal late-afternoon light, yet the story moves with the inevitability of change, as though the season is slipping through the fingers of the characters and the audience at once.

But the myth of summer in cinema is more than nostalgia. It is a temporal distortion. Time in summer films expands and contracts—afternoons last forever, yet the season ends abruptly, taking everything with it. In The River (1951) by Jean Renoir, summer in Bengal becomes a sensuous bridge between childhood and adulthood, with light that feels ancient, as if borrowed from another century. In Youssef Chahine’s coastal films, the sea and the sun are both liberating and cruel, granting freedom while reminding characters of its expiry date.

In many works, especially from Mediterranean and North African contexts, summer is not innocent—it carries the weight of politics, social change, and cultural transition.

To watch a summer film is to participate in an act of remembering, even if you have never lived the memory. The cinema of summer functions like a postcard sent from an impossible time: you can look at it, almost smell the heat and salt, but you cannot stay there. The camera tries to preserve it, yet the frame itself is a kind of elegy. The season remembers us as much as we remember it—holding our past selves in its warmth, but only long enough to make us feel the loss when it is gone.

Summer in cinema is rarely neutral. It is active, demanding, alive. For auteurs like Rohmer, Guadagnino, Kore-eda, Chahine, and Allouache, summer is a collaborator—a mood board for emotion, reflection, and revelation. So next time you watch a film set in summer, look beyond the beach towels and holiday houses. Watch how the light falls. Listen to the slow cadence of conversations. Feel the way time dissolves. Because in the hands of great filmmakers, summer isn’t just the warmest season—it’s the most alive character in the frame.

My love for cinema began when I was a youngen with an overflowing of emotions and no cradle to contain them. As I plunged deeper into the art, cinema became the vessel I needed, and with time it consumed my spirit and reshaped the way I see the world. At first, it was nothing more than the thrill of images flickering in the dark, but soon it became a language through which I understood life itself. Films taught me how to look at people, how to read gestures and silences, how to sense beauty in fleeting instants. They gave me joy, but also sadness, reflection, and a way of questioning the world around me. In every frame, I found both a mirror and an escape, both intimacy and distance. Cinema became not only an art I admired, but a companion that never ceased to challenge me, to comfort me, and to awaken in me a desire to see more deeply.

Along this journey, I have met people who shared this passion, who nurtured it and stretched it beyond what I thought my own mind could. I would like to thank them — even the strangers whose fleeting conversations about films left a lasting echo. Most of all, I owe thanks to my life and cinema companion, who has always urged me to look with a critical eye, and whose sensibility to cinema, and to life itself, is as poetic as light trembling on water, as profound and restless as the sea.

The sole purpose of this magazine is to be a conversation: open, imperfect, and alive. It exists for no other reason than the joy of creating, of exploring, and of giving form to thoughts and images that move us, of sharing the love of cinema as something communal rather than solitary.

This first edition is both a beginning and an offering, a small tide that carries with it fragments of memory, gratitude, and my own personal wonder — and sets them gently on the shore for you to enjoy.

From the outset, his approach to realism diverged from strict reportage; it was grounded in observation, yet always aware of cinema’s expressive potential. Even in his most ostensibly realist works, there exists an undercurrent of aesthetic stylization and emotional resonance that gestures toward a more layered cinematic language.

La Terra Trema, while aligned with Neorealism in form and intent, reveals this tension between faithful representation and interpretive expression—a tension that would come to define much of Visconti’s oeuvre.

Though initially conceived as a documentary, La Terra Trema ultimately blends documentary realism with a poetic visual subjectivity. Rather than merely presenting socio-economic hardship, the film interprets it, achieving not only the directness of non-fiction but also the dramatic depth of tragic narrative. This fusion allows Visconti to maintain the ideological clarity of Neorealism while expanding its emotional and symbolic range.

The film adheres to several core Neorealist principles: it casts non-professional actors—local Sicilian fishermen and villagers—who speak in their unadorned dialect, and it avoids artificial lighting, post-synchronized sound, and studio effects. Shot entirely on location in Aci Trezza, a small fishing village in Sicily, the film immerses itself in the textures of real, lived environments.

The characters’ struggles unfold amidst actual material conditions, grounding the story in a stark realism that aligns with the movement’s dedication to social truth.

Yet La Terra Trema does not simply document poverty; it renders it with emotional intensity and formal precision. The narrative arc—charting the fragile rise and crushing fall of a family’s hope—conveys not just systemic injustice, but the quiet devastation of personal loss. This tragic trajectory transforms the film into more than a political statement; it becomes a work of expressive cinema, articulating the psychological and existential toll of exploitation.

The cinematography underscores this shift. While Neorealist works are often associated with observational neutrality, Visconti’s camera adopts a more composed and interpretive gaze. Through deliberate framing, tonal contrast, and chiaroscuro lighting, the film reveals a visual language that resonates with the emotional stylization of German Expressionism.

These choices introduce a layer of abstraction that complicates the film’s realism—not undermining it, but deepening its affective power. This interplay of realism and stylization exposes a central paradox within cinematic representation: the unfiltered image, however faithful, does not inherently convey meaning. Realism, in its rawest form, risks translating as apathetic—ethically, emotionally , and politically. Visconti seems acutely aware of this limitation. In La Terra Trema, the camera not only observes but interprets, inviting viewers to engage not only with what is seen, but with how and why it is shown.

Photographic truth, then, proves voiceless without narrative consciousness and symbolic framing. Visconti’s film asserts that realism in cinema must be more than mimetic; it must be legible, shaped by a perspective that guides the viewer through the emotional and structural logic of the world onscreen.

One evening, he meets a young woman named Nastenka, and over the course of four nights, they form an intense emotional bond. The narrator falls deeply in love with her, only to discover that she remains devoted to another man. In the end, he is left heartbroken, his brief brush with connection fading back into solitude.

While Dostoevsky’s original is intimate and quietly melancholic, Visconti’s adaptation amplifies the emotions into something far more operatic. The heightened sense of romance is on a scale of its own—hauntingly Opera-like—which lies firmly within Visconti’s domain of expertise, having staged and directed operas throughout his career.

The actors take up the screen with wide, expressive movements, fervent gestures, and excruciatingly intense facial expressions. The entire film feels like a hazy, poetic dream.

Each of Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell, and even Jean Marais, have a distinct flare to their performances: While the latter exudes a mysterious, at-times-sinister air to his character, making himself a daunting presence in the lives of the two main dramatis personae, Marcello brings a naïveté and romance to Mario that successfully extracts itself from the original character in the novel, the dreamer.

Maria Schell’s Nastenka, or in this case Natalia, is the perfect ingénue. Her youthful innocence, untouched by the harsher realities of her life, is as captivating to her two love interests as it is to the audience. She displays a deep yearning, emotionality and gentleness much like in the novel, but a blatant disregard and impulsivity that her male counterpart either cannot detect or refuses to acknowledge, charmed and smitten with her big doe eyes and childlike purity: The perfect weapon against the dreams and hopes of the earnest romantic.

But Visconti goes beyond, he does not content himself with human characters, but as the neorealism founding father, creates another character as the backdrop of those figures chasing love, a future and happiness: The city, Venice.

The setting of Le Notti Bianche is primarily in a dreamlike version of post-World War II Italy, specifically in the city of Livorno. The narrative unfolds in a harsh depressing urban landscape that reflects the sense of isolation and longing in the story. Mario and Natalia walk through a landscape of crumbling buildings, collapsed roofs, eroded pavements and underbridges besieged with the homeless and those living on the fringes of society.

While to Mario it reflects and foreshadows his heartbreak and falling apart, to Natalia, it is a present state which she is accustomed to, but will eventually escape.

Marcello and Maria walk together as parallels, unfolding their story in the cold muddy unforgiving streets of a ruined, once ‘city of love and romance’.

One very revealing scene is where they are on a boat under the bridge, Mario’s image of the city and of the lovers’ gondola rides shattered, as the city’s night life is exposed to his eyes, yet he promises Natalia a better future, not knowing she will eventually (presumably) have it, just simply not with him.

Much like 1960s Hong-Kong in Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love, Livorno, Venice is a character that breathes life into its residents and personifies their unfulfilled dreams and lost hopes, and reminds them that flames die out even if they grab onto them with all their might.

War and winter are cold on the tender-hearted; Both Visconti and Dostoevsky make a point to remind us that.