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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

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The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

There’s a scene in the documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere, about the Belgian filmmaker’s Chantal Akerman’s life and work, where she discusses her only foray into commercial filmmaking, the William Hurt and Juliette Binoche vehicle, A Couch in New York She and Hurt butted heads (even in this short anecdote you can sense her quiet obstinacy, her absolute refusal to bow to Hurt’s celebrity); nobody saw it and those who did, didn’t like it; it was, by any metric, a failure Critics took issue with both the romantic and comedic aspects of the film – a problem for a romantic comedy Akerman handles it with trademark good humour There are no scores to settle here, no grievances to unload, although the viewer must understand, perhaps now more than ever, the intense private battles Akerman must have fought to survive as an artist Certainly, Akerman possessed the singular vision, marvellous self-sufficiency (she made her first film when she was eighteen; she made another in just one week), attention to detail, and strong will we idolise in male auteurs; traits, for example, more recently venerated in Quentin Tarantino The scene concludes with Akerman seated defiantly in a diner, refusing to be embarrassed or humiliated by the box-office takings of a film about an unlikely couple brought together by an apartment swap There’s a slight air of mischievousness about her, a mutinous part of her that finds it amusing that the film was made at all, that they actually allowed her to make it Well, what was her great failure? The truth is Akerman couldn’t, even if she tried, – and the punchline is she did try – make a dumb movie   My Mother Laughs isn’t a memoir — no sign of Jonas Mekas, no brief, holy appearance of Agnes Varda, hardly any reference to her film career It’s a further step in her complex self-representation project, which began in 1968 with the short

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

READ NEXT

Prize Entry

April 2016

clerical error

Victoria Manifold

Prize Entry

April 2016

Due to a clerical error on my part, the current Prime Minister is now living in the box room...

Interview

February 2014

Interview with Patrick Keiller

David Anderson

Interview

February 2014

Patrick Keiller, an architect ‘diverted’ into making films, is principally known for his Robinson series, which began with  London (1994)...

fiction

April 2013

The Story I'm Thinking Of

Jonathan Gibbs

fiction

April 2013

There were seven of us sat around the table. Seven grown adults, sat around the table. It was late. We...

 

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