Author Spotlight

Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana is a novelist and cultural critic.

10 Results
The Phantom of Liberty: The Serpentine Movements of Chance

Luis Buñuel lays bare the amorality and illogic of human affairs in the slew of straight-faced absurdities that make up his penultimate film.

By Gary Indiana

Pickpocket:Robert Bresson: Hidden in Plain Sight
Ihave an unusually easy way of remembering when I first became fascinated by Robert Bresson’s films. Pickpocket (1959) was the first one I saw, at the old Orson Welles theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in my late teens; it was also the first mov…

By Gary Indiana

Naked Lunch: Burroughs
This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural …

By Gary Indiana

The Last Weekend

Jean Luc Godard’s exuberant, multipronged attack on the bourgeoisie is both theater of the absurd and political horror.

By Gary Indiana

Salò: The Written Movie

The spectacle of joyless lubricity and dehumanizing cruelty and carnage visualized by Pier Paolo Pasolini could not be further from the dry, dense, and circular arguments to be found in the printed pages of his bibliographic sources.



By Gary Indiana

Léon Morin, Priest: Life During Wartime
To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh in…

By Gary Indiana

Videodrome: The Slithery Sense of Unreality
“Eroticism,” Luis Buñuel told an interviewer, “is a diabolic pleasure that is related to death and rotting flesh.” No filmmaker conveys this idea with more ingenuity and macabre gusto than David Cronenberg, whose movies (hilariously, terrify…

By Gary Indiana

Les enfants terribles: Hazards of a Snowball Fight

This unforgettable drama about damaged adolescents combines Jean Cocteau’s penchant for mythic poetry and Jean-Pierre Melville's knack for crafting intricate schemes.

By Gary Indiana

Barbet and Koko: An Equivocal Love Affair

In his unpredictable daily encounters with the gorilla Koko and her teacher, Barbet Schroeder foregrounds the quiddity of Koko’s situation in episodic fashion.

By Gary Indiana

Pasolini, Mamma Roma, and La Ricotta

Indefatigably productive, ingenious, exasperating, narcissistically didactic, slyly self-promoting, abject, generous, exploitative, devoted to the wretched of the earth with honest fervor and deluded romanticism: Pier Paolo Pasolini can easily exhaus

By Gary Indiana