Susan Kerns (She/Her)
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Susan Kerns (She/Her)
@ssk8.bsky.social
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MKE Film & Mke Film Festival. Professor, writer, filmmaker. Refocus: The Films of Susan Seidelman out now from Edinburgh UP.
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Reposted by Susan Kerns (She/Her)
dean.bsky.social
Ben Shahn
Natchez, Mississippi
October 1935

In the early 1930s, Shahn learned a great deal from Walker Evans, whose studio he shared. But Shahn did very little picture taking after he left the Farm Security Administration in 1938.
A young black man sitting in front of a barber shop
September 12, 2025 at 3:53 PM
Reposted by Susan Kerns (She/Her)
scsheil.bsky.social
There's an interesting section in David Foster Wallace's piece about Lynch's Lost Highway, where he talks about the difference between Lynch and Tarantino (and how much Lynch was an influence on a whole crop of filmmakers)
In 1995, PBS ran a lavish ten-part documentary called American Cinema whose final episode was devoted to "The Edge of Hollywood" and the increasing influence of young independent filmmakers - the Coens, Jim Jarmusch, Carl Franklin, Q. Tarantino et al. It was not just unfair but bizarre that David Lynch's name was never once mentioned in the episode, because his influence is all over these directors. The Band-Aid on the neck of Pulp Fiction's Marcellus Wallace - unexplained, visually incongruous, and featured prominently in three separate set-ups-is textbook Lynch. So are the long, self-consciously mundane dialogues on pork, foot massages, TV pilots, etc. that punctuate Pulp Fiction's violence, a violence whose creepy/comic stylization is also resoundingly Lynchian. The peculiar narrative tone of Tarantino's films - the thing that makes them seem at once strident and obscure, not-quite-clear in a haunting way — is Lynch's tone; Lynch invented this tone. It seems to me fair to say that the commercial Hollywood phenomenon that is Mr. Quentin Tarantino would not exist without David Lynch as a touch stone, a set of allusive codes and contexts in the viewer's deep-brain core. In a way, what Tarantino's done with the French New Wave and with Lynch is what Pat Boone did with Little Richard and Fats Domino: he found (rather ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reser voir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch-chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from dec ades past, is Lynch made commercial, i.e. faster, linearer, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e. "hiply") surreal... Take the granddaddy of in-your-ribs Blue Velvet references: the scene in Reservoir Dogs where Michael Madsen, dancing to a cheesy '70s tune, cuts off a hostage's ear. This just isn't subtle at all. None of this is to say that Lynch himself doesn't owe debts-to Hitchcock, to Cassavetes, to Bresson and Deren and Wiene. But it is to say that Lynch has in many ways cleared and made arable the contempo- rary "anti-Hollywood" territory that Tarantino et al. are cash-cropping right now.12 Recall that both The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet came out in the 1980s, that metastatic decade of cable, VCRs, merchandis- ing tie-ins and multinational blockbusters, all the big-money stuff that threatened to empty the American film industry of everything that wasn't High Concept. Lynch's moody, creepy, obsessive, unmistakeably personal movies were to High Concept what the first great '40s noir films were to toothy musicals: unforeseen critical and commercial successes that struck a nerve with audiences and expanded studios' and distribu- tors' idea of what would sell. It is to say that we owe Lynch a lot. And it is also to say that David Lynch, at age 50, is a better, more complex, more interesting director than any of the hip young "rebels" making violently ironic films for New Line and Miramax today. It is particularly to say that - even without considering recent cringers like Four Rooms or From Dusk to Dawn - D. Lynch is an exponentially bet- ter filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. This is why violence in Lynch's films, grotesque and coldly stylized and symbolically heavy as it may be, is qualitatively different from Hollywood's or even anti-Hollywood's hip cartoon-violence. Lynch's violence always tries to mean something. 9a a better way to put what i just tried to say Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.
February 28, 2025 at 9:22 PM
Reposted by Susan Kerns (She/Her)
alixfm.bsky.social
I got to sit down with filmmaker Elaine Epstein and talk about her very relevant reproductive rights documentary ARREST THE MIDWIFE hyperrealfilm.club/reviews/arre...
SXSW '25: Elaine Epstein on Arrest the Midwife — Hyperreal Film Club
Filmmaker Elaine Epstein on her SXSW premiere of Arrest the Midwife, a documentary on the plight of three midwives in the Northeast.
hyperrealfilm.club
March 28, 2025 at 2:53 AM