The Big Picture MagazineEmma Kansiz tries to live her life in the spirit of the mystical child warrior Atreyu from the Neverending Story. She loves learning about the intersection between geography, landscape, and cinema. She loves experimental films, campy horror, and Americana infused road movies. Her favorite pastimes are taking photographs of small towns at sunset and sitting around a campfire in the middle of the forest. She enjoys writing about visual culture and album covers at her website The Wonder List and hopes to one day meet Jay & Silent Bob.
When the sun is high, it casts the most unyielding shadows. And in Jodorowsky’s unflinchingly off-kilter masterpiece The Holy Mountain (1973), the sun is always out, illuminating the improbable tangents of the human condition and stirring the dark impulses that lurk in our culture’s crevices. As a piece of high-camp, low-inhibition social commentary, The Holy […]
Life is not a stroll across a field – Boris Pasternak Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) reveals, in a poignant and compassionate tenor, the evolution of youthful expectations as they are molded, corrupted, and realigned by the passage of time. When youthful ambitions are seen through the prism of adulthood they refract strange […]
Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987) is an ambitious, poetic meditation on the way we each inhabit our own inner world, skimming the surface of another’s truth and experience, but rarely penetrating it. We each occupy an individual landscape of memories, secrets, and fears. We seek repose and solace in the lives of others as a […]
“The world was like a faraway planet to which I could never return” – Holly, Badlands Terrence Malick’s directorial debut Badlands (1973) is in many respects a tale of escapism writ large over a collection of isolated interior and exterior landscapes. Our protagonists seek to construct their own mythologies and rewrite their own histories, with […]
As I walk The Hemisphere Got my wish To up and disappear -“No Ceiling”, Eddie Vedder Into the Wild’s (2007) soundtrack integrates all of the contours, nuances, and mysteries of the wild and tamed places and becomes a living moodboard of the American landscape. We can hear the winds sweeping across the canyons of Arizona, […]
In Alex Cox’s directorial debut Repo Man (1984), Emilio Estevez’s character Otto Maddox muddies the traditional code of appropriate masculinity with his brazen take on counterculture sartorial expression. His swagger and screw the man credentials are made manifest by his solo earring, seen petulantly swaying from his left ear. There is a nebulous sensuality to […]