I've been thinking about Yanagimachi Mitsuo's documentaries recently and decided to re-edit this essay from two years ago.

Although filmmakers of Japan have traditionally addressed national identity in their work it was not until the Japanese New Wave—or Nuberu bagu—that this self-analysis brought the country's cinema to international relevancy, rather than serve to mark it as exotic or inaccessible for most viewers. Events in Japanese society—student movements, political upheaval, globalization, a rift between generations—appeared analogous to those in the rest of the world. Of course issues in each region were not interchangeable, and neither were people's reactions.

Liu Bolin, Beijing-based artist camouflaging himself through the use of paint and (reportedly) no camera tricks. Eerie appearancerecalls a fear of camouflage artists brought on by a late night viewing of the TV movie When a Stranger Calls Back (1993, trailer,rip). Bolin has interesting things to say (from which this post takes it's title) about his work and his country of origin in a short, problematically translated essay, entitled "When Concealment Becomes a Strategy"

Another old essay written for an English class in my Junior year of High School, presented without postmortem
manipulation /editing:

The page I note as capturing some of the essence of the entire story is page 136, from Part II, entitled; "Entry Into Society." This passage shows Eugène's moral problems to be universal. Bianchon offers him a useful point of view, but this does not stop Eugène's descent into amorality, even as he cites love and devotion as being a cause. The greatest representation of this kind of behavior is shown through the tile character, Perè Goriot. Goriot sacrifices so much for his daughters, without receiving much in return, just enough to nearly sate his sickly decreasing standards for love. But the sacrifice that Eugène poses before Bianchon is not of oneself, but of a stranger. He even adds that he never would have known him, and jokes about the stranger's worth according to age.

I recently picked up the lat­est issue of Moviemaker Mag­a­zine, the 2010 edi­tion of their annual "Com­plete Guide to Mak­ing Movies" series, an infor­ma­tive issue fea­tur­ing mildly instruc­tive arti­cles orga­nized by stages of pro­duc­tion writ­ten by indus­try pro­fes­sion­als with rel­e­vant spe­cial­ties. Its cover fea­tures an illus­tra­tion of the evo­lu­tion of the inde­pen­dent moviemaker in the style of early evo­lu­tion­ists' depic­tions of the mon­key walk­ing step by step to becom­ing mod­ern man.

This story ful­filled an assign­ment for my twelfth grade Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture course. It was labeled "Alien Story: Sce­nario 1". Not sure what sce­nario num­ber two was, but I recall this hav­ing ful­filled an assign­ment to con­tem­po­rize cer­tain events in Amer­i­can his­tory. Pretty thin veil. Lots of "gray".

One of my more pas­sion­ate early attempts at crit­i­cal lit­er­a­ture analy­sis, on the work of the vastly under-read Michel Bernanos, son of Georges Bernanos. Michel report­edly wrote a great deal of pulp fic­tion under var­i­ous pseu­do­nyms in his time. This is the only book I'm aware of that he pub­lished under his own name. This essay was point­edly sub­ti­tled "An assign­ment by Joel Ander­son". This was writ­ten for a Euro­pean Lit­er­a­ture course in my Senior year of high school, soon after read­ing Madame Bovary. As usual with these posted archival mate­ri­als, all gram­mat­i­cal errors have been retained. It really is a beau­ti­ful book.

A short story writ­ten to ful­fill an assign­ment in my ninth grade A-Block his­tory course. I'm not sure where this was going, and don't think I knew then. Pre­sented with­out ret­ro­spec­tive edit­ing as with all archived fic­tion on the site: