things i liked in december

monthly recap of art, music, books, objects, and rituals

ART

Francesca Woodman Photography

I came across Francesca Woodman’s work after seeing her book at a museum gift store a few weeks ago, and the images have stuck with me since. Her photography explores subjects of identity, surrealism, gender, and sexuality; with an emphasis on how the self relates to the physical environment. She began to take photographs in the 60s at the age of thirteen until her suicide at the age of twenty-two.

If you’re curious, there’s also an interesting documentary about her life called The Woodmans about her upbringing, artistic process, and tragic death.

MOVIES

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

This movie is like if Virgin Suicides and Twin Peaks had a baby. It has Coppola’s dreamlike aesthetic quality, exploring tropes on womanhood and femininity, all under a more strange and dark narrative structure that is reminiscent of Lynch.

La Ciénaga (2001)

This is a slow contemplative film that poignantly captures feelings of social tension and discomfort—all under the backdrop of a wealthy family home in the Argentinean countryside. The film does not follow a typical linear narrative style. Instead, the viewer gets glimpses of everyday moments, interspaced with shots of nature and pure silence. Yet when combined, these scenes instill in the viewer an acute sense of exhaustion, heartbreak, and desperation, all experienced by the characters in the film.

If you watch this movie, I highly recommend reading David Oubiña’s essay La Ciénaga: What’s Outside the Frame. He does an incredible job of describing how Director Lucrecia Martel succeeds in creating this unease and tension:

She sets up these disturbing situations, then avoids and ignores the potential damage, as if the eventualities had never existed. But we remain unsettled by the accidents that seemed inevitable, and they stay with us as what could have occurred, or what could still occur at any moment. In this world, each action, each gesture is overdetermined by a density that stalks the film from outside it, and that lingers like mud under the surface of quotidian life; each image is only half of what can be seen. Behind the apparently chaotic accumulation of characters and situations, Martel treats filmmaking as a subtractive process and the film as a reduction, though what she excludes remains in the suburbs of the image, troubling what we see.

Nine Queens (2002)

This movie had been on my list forever. As a kid, I remember half-listening to conversations between my parents and their friends describing various scenes, cackling at specific references—and I was always left feeling equally confused and intrigued. So I finally watched it, and suffice to say, it lived up to expectations.

This movie is outrageously funny and absurd. It’s a dark comedy/thriller that follows two con artists in Buenos Aires, and their seemingly unstable cooperation with one another. I can’t say more without the risk of ruining it.

My advice is to go into the movie without much context and let it surprise you.

MUSIC

When winter approaches, I usually find myself gravitating to albums and songs that evoke different points of inflection in my life. I canonize these memories, dissecting the details, reevaluating the narratives, probing the subtext—all while replaying old playlists. It must be something about being inside more and watching the year come to an end that makes me a whore for nostalgia.

But this year, that same process of reminiscing and reliving felt more exhausting than comforting, and the memories felt stale and overplayed. In short, I haven’t been in the mood to listen to older playlists, and I’m trying to listen to songs that just feel good in the moment.

READING

• Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro - A novel about a woman trying to solve her daughter’s murder all while her Parkinson’s disease progresses. Beautifully written and captivating.

• Having Done Wrong by Oded Na’aman - An excellent article on what repentance means on a philosophical level. Na’aman recounts his experience as a former IDF soldier, and the process of reflecting on his moral failures in contributing to an oppressive regime.

• Exit the Matrix by Adina Glickstein - I’m a big fan of Glickstein’s writing style and her User Error series. This is the last article in the series where she discusses melancholia and its ties to a larger sense of collective nihilism.