Laura Staab

Oct 3, 2024 | mubi.com | Laura Staab

That we can be here…and still find things to call beautiful and to love or to be unable to stop loving is indefensible. But we are here, and we do. —Anahid Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s DiscourseOceanic waters are “drenched in sperm and tears” as “Sea Foam”—one of 27 pensive, playful texts in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leuco (1947)—begins. How boring, remarks Sappho to a nearby nymph.

Mar 25, 2024 | mubi.com | Laura Staab

Speaking at the press conference to inaugurate the 74th Berlinale, actor and competition jury president Lupita Nyong'o said that she had heard one remark repeated since she had arrived in the German capital: “how political the Berlinale is.” She was not alone in being “curious to learn what that meant.”When we expect the Berlinale to be political, what indeed do we expect?

Feb 9, 2024 | mubi.com | Laura Staab

Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.      Graves grow no green that you can use.      Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.       —Gwendolyn Brooks, “To the Young Who Want to Die”Cynicism has no place in Bas Devos’s Here (2023), a meshwork of small utopias in which the most urgent problem, on the surface of things, is the prospect of some vegetables going to waste.

Oct 29, 2023 | viennale.at | Laura Staab

by Laura StaabMaya Deren’s Morton Street apartment in Greenwich Village and Marie Menken’s Montague Street apartment in Brooklyn Heights were cradles of experimental film in 1950s and 1960s New York. Artful places where each filmmaker lived, socialised, and worked, these frenetic apartments were studios, salons, and domestic spaces combined.

Oct 5, 2023 | anothergaze.com | Laura Staab

In the beginning, there is fog and there is thunder. The Gods are enraged. It is a struggle to see the mountains and their trees. After some time, darkness comes; a night that would render the two figures in the landscape almost imperceptible if it weren’t for their cries. As dawn arrives, a man in red emerges, clambering up a steep incline. So far, so arduous—and seemingly doomed.