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Philippa Snow
Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including ArtforumThe Los Angeles Review of BooksArtReviewFriezeVogueThe NationThe New Statesman, and The New Republic. Her first book, Which As You Know Means Violence, is out now with Repeater, and she is currently working on an essay collection about famous women.  

Articles Available Online


You Don’t Think God Is Sexy?

Film Review

January 2023

Philippa Snow

Film Review

January 2023

On the most literal level, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s elliptical, spiritual-cum-sensual movie Teorema (1968) is about an entire family being driven to distraction by their...

Essay

Issue No. 31

It's Terrible The Things I Have To Do To Be Me

Philippa Snow

Essay

Issue No. 31

Here was a woman who had modelled her life so closely on Marilyn Monroe’s that doing so eventually helped...

I   Look up A woman tumbles from the sky, her dress billowing around her like a parachute as she spins The air caught in her skirt slows her fall, and she wonders what she is doing here as she panics, as she hits the mud on the River Avon, glistening silver in the light at low tide She lives  Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol She is Sarah Ann Henley, of 30 Twinnell Road, Bristol The year is 1885, and she has quarrelled with her lover She is one of only four over the next hundred years to fall from Clifton Suspension Bridge and survive Two of that number are children, who plummet over the side, together, a decade later Their picture is in a locket Sarah owns when she dies, in 1948   Cities are full of ghosts They are contained in the things we walk past every day: the roots growing from the plane tree into the pavement, the string wound round a metal fence, the cement traffic barriers lined up to stop cars driving down a lane that doesn’t exist They lurk in cracks in the sidewalk, hinting at histories that have long been ignored   This is a ghost story full of doublings and hauntings I look at Bristol — where I’m a tourist, where I have no past, only a present — and read the past everywhere, like an overlay: two maps, two cities, past and present I grew up in a small suburban town outside Washington, DC, that had been home to the country’s biggest slave traders, but no one ever mentioned that Bristol, too, is built on money from the slave trade, but all you hear about are pirates: Bristol is obsessed with its glorious history All around, Brutalist buildings are being torn down     *   Recovering in hospital, our fallen woman receives proposals, not only of marriage Her father is offered a fortune to turn her into a popular entertainment, a freak show She and her beau, a railway porter, perhaps reconcile; she begs for him He tries to

Contributor

November 2018

Philippa Snow

Contributor

November 2018

Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, Vogue, The...

Essay

January 2021

An Uneasy Girl

Philippa Snow

Essay

January 2021

Even before Lucie arrives holding a shotgun, we know that the perfect family in this huge suburban house are...

Brilliant Muscles

Essay

December 2019

Philippa Snow

Essay

December 2019

‘Lindsay Lohan’s new film,’ I told almost everyone I spoke to for about two months earlier this year, ‘is about werewolf detectives.’ Nobody seemed...
Evita Vasiljeva, POSTCRETE

Art Review

February 2019

Philippa Snow

Art Review

February 2019

Lower.Green is situated in the unlikely surroundings of a near-dead mall in Norwich. It is not just any mall, but Anglia Square Shopping Centre:...
Gabriele Beveridge, Live Dead World

Art Review

November 2018

Philippa Snow

Art Review

November 2018

Several months ago, I went to a salon so small and so identikit that I do not recall the name, and against every sane...

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feature

October 2014

Blood Out of a Zombie

Laurence A. Rickels

feature

October 2014

The German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger has on three different occasions put the camera aside and directed for the theatre, each...

poetry

October 2013

Transylvania

Jon Stone

poetry

October 2013

The rabbit darkness just beyond the headlights’ sprawl and parcel darkness stopping up the drivers’ mouths like oaths or...

poetry

December 2016

Of all those pasts

Will Harris

poetry

December 2016

  In Derrida’s Memoires: For Paul de Man he quotes from ‘Mnemosyne’, a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin which he...

 

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