Camera Obscura: (Latin: “dark chamber”) is an optical device that led to photography and the photographic camera. The following films penetrate the modern psyche through an all too clear lens–its iterations, ethos, phobias, catharsis, and moreover, crisis. With stunning clarity, these masters peered into a void and showed us the contemporaneous man in all of its conflicting form before our eyes.  

Every time I read or watch narrative subject matter about modern life, I’m reminded, like others, of our former observers’ clarity. Yes, they had unstoppable imaginations lit on fire, but as fantasy bleeds into reality it’s the warnings that leave a knot. We know they’re there, but our modes of modern catharsis are only synthetic and soon we won’t know what’s real and what’s not. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) doesn’t know, violently waking supine in a water-filled bathtub as a dingy ceiling light undulates above. More so, he awakens with no memory to an Art Deco nightmare where, in the words of “The Strangers”, “All times and no times are blended together.” Read More