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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

‘I remember touch Pictures came with touch’ -Daft Punk, ‘Touch’   In the 1990s, three important pre post-reality films about identity, imitation, and grief came out: Steven Soderberg’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989-1990), Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue (1993) I saw the American indie film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape and the French-Polish art house Blue as a teenager I saw the Iranian docu-fiction, Close-Up, in 2012 All three films are definitively 90s movies to me All three films examine the line between reality and fiction, the enactment of roles, and the place and performance of identity Yet they are also concerned with veracity during a decade that had one last grasp on reality   In Close-Up, Hossain Sazbain, film-lover and devoted fan of the celebrated post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbāf, assumes the identity of the director When Sazbain’s ‘scam’ is discovered, he is put on trial for identity fraudulence A true story, Close-Up consists not simply of reenactment or accurate portrayal, but the representation and staging of truth in/as cinema In the film, the fourth wall is cracked open, so that reality and fiction, on-screen and off-screen, are spun from all directions, creating a seamless, interconnected effect that forecasts the digital age, where screens and performances run on continuous loop and no one is really anyone off-camera     For Sazbain everything is in a name Appellation alone produces identity and political freedom Like the beloved American idiot (an early incarnation of Forrest Gump) ‘Chance the Gardener’, who is mistaken for the upper class ‘Chauncey Gardiner’ in Hal Ashby’s American satire Being There, being does not require actually (real) being Sazbain’s being resides in the appropriation of a name that certifies cultural esteem and artistic invention Assuming someone else’s identity provides him with a role in life and an escape from a repressive political system However, Sazbain does not try to impersonate Makhmalbāf in any literal way, for he’s never actually seen or met him Instead Makhmalbāf

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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fiction

June 2011

Arthur Miller

Michael Amherst

fiction

June 2011

The last time I saw Vin and Jackie we were killing slugs. The three of us had been smoking...

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January 2014

Afterword: The Death of the Translator

George Szirtes

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January 2014

1. The translator meets himself emerging from his lover’s bedroom. So much for fidelity, he thinks. 2. Je est...

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Paula Rego

Ben Eastham

Helen Graham

Interview

Issue No. 1

Dame Paula Rego introduces me into her North London home with a crooked smile and a plate of biscuits....

 

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