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Author Archives: Rokhl Kafrissen
October 10, 2018 by Rokhl Kafrissen
Caught Between Skepticism and Yearning on the Holidays
Like a lot of American Jews, I have a complicated relationship to Jewish worship. Unlike most American Jews, it got complicated enough at one point that I wrote to a dog for advice.
Now, Tango isn’t just any dog. He’s a very wise pitbull who lives with a very wise friend of mine, Margie, in St. Paul, Minnesota. And the occasion wasn’t just any holiday, but Yom Kippur 2014, when all I wanted to do was hide in my apartment for 25 hours. My friend Margie announced that her dog was starting a new career as an advice columnist (yes, this really happened). Did I want to ask him a question? I once went all the way from New York City to Hoboken to talk to a psychic. Of course I wanted to ask Margie’s dog for advice.
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September 7, 2018 by Rokhl Kafrissen
Surfaces, Glitter… and Feminism? A Cinematic Ode to Matriarchy
There’s something radically painterly, about Sofia Bohanovich’s new documentary film Maison du Bonheur. Bohanovich spent a month in Paris living with the 77-year-old mother of a friend of hers, Juliane Sellam. The resulting film is as much an intoxicating series of images, both domestic and urbane, as it is a story about the still coquettish Mme. Sellam.
Narrative film is so dominant today that we forget how at the dawn of moving pictures, artists and theorists understood that film was like painting. They saw that it was in editing and montage—placing images next to each other in non-linear fashion—that the radical artistic potential of cinema could be found. It’s worth seeking out this film not only for its subject, but for how it demonstrates the flexibility and artistry of the camera.
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