detectiveangel

[detectiveangel]

#apologies #happy birthday billie holiday #music #shitpost #movies #mickey rourke #film #jazz

[detectiveangel]

with help from the digital review (thedigitalreview.com), i've built a website to house findings from my ongoing investigations of the neo-noir-horror film angel heart (1987), late soviet video culture & new forms of expression to suit compounding crises in scholarship, genre, gender & (my)self.

nb: the website is meant to be freely explored like a dossier of evidence or archive of unfinished works. it's not optimized for mobile browsers.

#кино #art #movies #angel heart #cinema #film #digital art #music #web art #horror #video #ussr #russia #soviet #queer #gender #film noir #mystery #detective

[detectiveangel]

spb

[detectiveangel]

postcard sent by sergei eisenstein to pera atasheva from new mexico in june 1930. the back reads "how strange it is that we three are together again and on new-mexican land!" and the front has his, eduard tisse's and grigori alexandrov's signatures.

#they really did a tag yourself bit #eisenstein #film #history #cinema #movies #postcards #1930s #эйзенштейн #история #кино #new mexico

[detectiveangel]

help

#and he was right!!

[detectiveangel]

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.

[detectiveangel]

francesco (1989, dr. liliana cavani)

transcending gender through penitent-ecstatic faith...

...after finding so many references in eisenstein's writings to the queerness of st. francis, i had some expectations going in to cavani's film with mickey "i was talent-scouted while working as a bouncer at a transvestite club" rourke in that role. this scene really hit.

#film #movies #italian #80s movies #gender #religion #francesco #st francis of assisi #mickey rourke #helena bonham carter #queer #historical #historical drama #mysticism #my life in movies #cinema #liliana cavani

[detectiveangel]

dostoyevsky themed blinkies i made with blinkies.cafe

[detectiveangel]

i know plenty of people are going to read it eventually and i can freely share pdfs across the world, but "there's no one to even rate my titanic labor" is kind of how i feel about finishing a dissertation that i won't be able to legally/officially publish any part of in russia until the pendulum of history swings back hard.

finished my dissertation

[detectiveangel]

finished my dissertation

#personal #movies #ussr #soviet #academia

[detectiveangel]

if you're wondering what it is like to be completing a phd in slavic studies in 2023...with a dissertation on queer art & russian national mythology...i have been obsessively listening to david bowie's scary monsters (1983), an album made by someone observing the rightwing turn in culture in the 80s after the stifled revolutions of the 60s-70s, and mentally reworking it into a concept album about the correspondences between 1917-1941 and 1991-2014 in russia. cannot stop doing this. my brain is almost automatically generating a video pastiche overlaying the events these two periods on top of each other. history is too damn cyclical.

#personal #music #russia #history #Youtube

[detectiveangel]

remembering the chicken wing place in moscow that had a flavor called "nicolas cajun" and shedding a single tear because i never got to try it

i was just handed a letter addressed to buffalo wild wings from the Department of Defense. WHY

[detectiveangel]

generally against engaging in call-out tumblr shit but if i see someone gassing up m*sha g*ssen, all bets are off. if there is anyone that deserves the full social justice warrior cancellation beatdown, it's that cynical old bat. the fuck out of here!! maybe they did some activism once long ago, but they've long since switched to being a center-right grifter who does the queer communities they have claimed to represent way more harm than good.

for the record i would forgive them if they apologized for shit they've said and done in the last decade and decided to turn over a new leaf. not that they care what i think (they've blocked me on twitter of course). but i don't think they deserve to be punished, just held accountable. having to watch that one journalist jack off on camera in the middle of a virtual newsroom roleplay about election scenarios in which they were playing donald trump is punishment enough, the universe really took care of that one.

#hater posting #as a russian-speaking transmasc this beef is very personal

[detectiveangel]

this is what i'm doing after i submit my dissertation

https://fb.watch/mjDHL25iin/?mibextid=Nif5oz

[detectiveangel]

mesmerized by the homoerotic suggestion of the cover photograph for the 28 july 1925 issue of soviet screen. i wonder if anyone ever used it in a collage, perhaps one made to be reprinted on fliers advertising for a gay disco in the 1990s...

#cinema #ussr #film #vintage media #1920s #1920s film #gay #homoerotic #soviet #dudes rock #photography #кино #ссср #гей

[detectiveangel]

5 weeks left in purgatory for meeeee

just seen someone criticize the divine comedy by saying that it's not relatable which is of course incommensurably stupid because relatability should never be the only criterion through which one can judge the validity and quality of a piece of work &c but also. just because you tedious unimaginative losers have never been on a journey to hell and purgatory with your long dead favorite writer doesn't mean others haven't. happened to me

[detectiveangel]

leonid utesov as the titular thief in "the career of spirka shpandyr" (1926)

getting a sense for how far the "wearing a belt over pants that have suspender buttons but not beltloops" look extends across cinematic depictions of down-at-heel anti-heroes. it first really came to my notice in angel heart, of course. feels like a good visual metaphor for being a guy who doesn't quite fit into society's norms. living outside the loop.

#god what a LOOK #smokey eye fake scar all time great combo #leonid utesov #ussr #film #1920s #1920s film #cinema #kino #soviet #кино #ссср #crime #comedy #silent film #russian #movies #guys #menswear #men's fashion #style