Brooks Riley, director, producer, film critic, editor and screenwriter, is a former Senior Editor of Film Comment magazine and former film critic for WNYC-TV. She has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Boston Phoenix, Opera News and The Washington Post. She also worked for Jean‐Luc Godard as producer at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios. She was Executive Producer on a number of films, including Mee-Shee the Water Giant, Puckoon, and Führer Ex. She has directed 10 opera productions for TV and DVD, including Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung from the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar and the Israeli Opera Festival’s Aida in Masada. Email: brooks.r [at] gmx.de
by Brooks Riley The Alps are much grander this morning. I like to think they tiptoed closer in the night, but it’s only an optical illusion created by a local high-pressure system called föhn, which magnifies them and everything else on the horizon. Sitting outside in the loggia, a spacious recessed balcony that resembles a…
by Brooks Riley Sometime in the late Fifties, Roman Vishniac, a pioneer of photomicrography, picked up a knife, cut a thick horizontal slice of skin from his own thumb and photographed it under a microscope using polarized light. The resulting image succeeded on two levels: the scientific parsing of human skin’s rich textural terrain; and…
by Brooks Riley When architect Otto Wagner commissioned this large painting by Carl Moll for the Kaiser’s personal railroad station in Vienna in 1899, he might not have seen the irony of an eagle’s view of the city. View of Vienna from a Balloon envisions a future beyond rails in which a bird shows the…
by Brooks Riley For someone who spent most of his life trying to get on Page Six, (the New York Post’s iconic gossip column), hitting Page One was pay dirt for Donald Trump. Now that he’s there, he means to stay there, devouring our attention for the foreseeable future. One could even argue that all…
by Brooks Riley “They are shape, form, waiting to emerge. They present the plastic possibilities of life,” Albrecht Dürer said this of the pillows in various states of rumpled use that he drew on the back of a piece of paper he had been using to draw hands, wasting no surface to explore the ‘plastic…
by Brooks Riley For most of us, the act of looking at a painting is, and should be, subjective. The baggage we bring to the confrontation–how we see, what we notice, what we know, how we feel, what we like or don’t like—is as individual as a finger print, and often highly idiosyncratic. Like the…
by Brooks Riley Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious. —Peter Ustinov President Trump is no laughing matter. Paradoxically, he’s become just that, a side-splitting political earthquake triggering a tsunami of jokes and routines that fill the late-night air with barbs so sharp no ordinary ego might survive, the limits of humor now…
by Brooks Riley According to a biologist who studies the properties of dirt, a single teaspoon of the stuff contains more living organisms than there are people on earth. Not a particularly salient fact, but enough to launch the imagination toward other epic notions and distortions of scale: What if our whole world is just…
by Brooks Riley First, the jungle out there: Sound familiar? Hint: It’s not the clatter of journalists in a feeding frenzy over the latest insanity to emerge from the White House. Just an ur-Twitter storm here in Mitteleuropa at 4 in the morning, recorded from my balcony. Ever since November 9, 2016 I’ve been looking…
by Brooks Riley I feel a stress disorder coming on. Call it Persistent Trump Stress Disorder. Or PTSD 2.0. This is not about Trump himself, the ‘dingo’ here, whose many inadequacies, fallacies and prevarications are scrutinized, dissected, biopsied, and finally lampooned 24/7 in every corner of the fourth estate, reaching every corner of the globe.…
by Brooks Riley National Theater, Goethe and Schiller To paraphrase Heinrich Heine, I dream of Weimar in the night—not the era, but the town of Weimar, a lovely word on its own, one steeped in intellectual significance, historical resonance, cultural audacity, political and artistic enlightenment, philosophical bravura–and in modern times monstrous atrocity. I remember the…
by Brooks Riley If I could hug a tree a day without seeming a complete idiot, I would. Trees matter to me now–how fast they grow, how full their crowns, how tall they are, how odd their leaves, how extraordinary their shapes, how thick their trunks, how nearby they are. This late interest has crept…
by Brooks Riley We are born into a noisy world. For most of us, it starts right off with the cries and whimpers of our own Mum as she tries to help us tunnel our way out of the womb. What from inside may have sounded like the couple fighting next door, explodes into the…
by Brooks Riley (who is standing on the bow of the ship above on September 11, 1959) The freight trains at night are so loud that in my dreams they become horizontal twin towers spewing sound into the air in horrifying percussive bursts. Sometimes they sound like jumbo jets landing beside my pillow. Or a…
by Brooks Riley In the last year, two extraordinary events have indelibly changed the immediate course of history, for better or worse. In an utterly surprising move, Germany, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, spontaneously accepted over a million refugees, most of them from the war in Syria, only slightly changing the demographic landscape of that…
by Brooks Riley I recently googled an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. Within seconds his image appeared before me, as compelling and alluring as it had once been for me so long ago. It wasn’t a living friend that I googled, never had been. It was a dead one, in more…
by Brooks Riley Try to see it this way: You’re up in the attic of your own body, there where the thoughts are stored. The vaulted ceiling of your cranium slopes gently down to the two windows through which you view the world and let the sun shine in. Left and right, two speakers pump…
by Brooks Riley (I began writing this article months ago, long before the refugee crisis.) —Morgen! (Morning!) —Guten Morgen! (Good morning!) —Morgen zusammen! (Morning, you two!) —Morgen Ihr zwei! (Morning, you two!) —Kalimera! (Morning, in Greek) —Servus! (Hi or bye, in leftover Latin from upper Bavaria) —Buenos Dias! (Morning, in Spanish) —Tag! (Good day, in…
by Brooks Riley ‘I can sleep when I’m dead.’ That’s how Rainer Werner Fassbinder justified his hell-bent, frenetic, productive/destructive dervish whirl through a short existence, trailing an oeuvre of 45 films, 21 plays and countless screenplays. He was 37 when he died. He’s been sleeping now for 33 years—a well-earned rest he wasn’t quite ready…
by Brooks Riley In the beginning was the story. It was a manuscript deeply embedded in the genes and it was all about survival, when instinct was the sole purveyor of instructions. It may be hard to conceive of a biological primer as an example of narrative, but getting by was, until then, the greatest…