Film

I, Tonya, the recent biopic on the figure skating phenomenon from Portland, Oregon, appears to offer little beyond the familiar Hollywood spectacle of the white working class. But, through its problematically white lens, Daniel Fraser argues, the film stages an unsettling interplay between the indeterminacy of truth and the true violence of poverty.

The world’s first synthetic fabric, rayon, made from congealed vegetable matter and human labour, was spun into artificial silk stockings and worn by the same women that mass produced it. Hannah Proctor uses this as a guiding metaphor for her analysis of interwar gender politics and their relation to today

In their recent networked film project, Ehmann and Farocki produce a multiply authored film installation about global labour that superimposes the problems of contemporary film onto the difficulty of representing capitalism today. Review by Sven Lütticken

The morally disgusting asymmetry of drones relates not only to their deployment by the powerful against the weak, but also to the radical disparity of risk entailed in exposing the defenceless living to pilotless killing machines. In her review of George Barber’s recent film Freestone Drone, artist Kate Rich, co-creator of the first art drone 'The BIT Plane', considers the sickly prospect of a drone that assumes (a happy) consciousness

Reconceiving man's relations to matter and the world of objects was not always the politically insipid theoretical pastime it has become. Here, Simon Mussell revisits the Frankfurt School's work to explore how their consideration of the 'thicket of material life' created new lines of resistance to social alienation

Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades

― Aleksandr Rodchenko, 1925

"It is the flattest and the dullest parts that in the end have the most life."

Robert Bresson

Harmony Korine's recent film Spring Breakers doesn't exactly reward stringent sociological critique. His use of manipulative, mnemonic, stylised and hyper-seductive techniques demands to be taken seriously in a different way. But how? Mira Mattar meets him at the threshold