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 Looking back at the year gone by is the tedious task of news editors who aim to make sense of the senseless, find connections where none exist, and leave us with a neat package of nostalgia to file away in our collective memory. I’ve never been partial to such wrap-ups, with their…
by Brooks Riley ‘Every situation in life, indeed every moment, is of infinite value, because it represents an entire eternity.’ –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe It seems we’re always tinkering with those eternities, not just to cherish their value or find their meaning, but to transform them into something else. Maybe that’s what creative writing ultimately…
by Brooks Riley Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise. —Novalis The first full moon I saw after the procedure looked as if it might burst, like a balloon with too much helium. It was just above the horizon, fat and dark yellow —moving slowly upward to the firmament where it would…
by Brooks Riley Not long ago, having steeled myself for the read-through of yet another dry but informative assessment of the body’s immune response to Covid 19 and her variant offspring, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself being dragged into a barbaric tale of murder and mayhem, full of gory details and dire strategies.…
by Brooks Riley A soft-spoken, self-effacing young man from Seoul may be the most listened-to living composer on the planet right now, with two blockbuster works of cinema and TV on his resumé. Not only did Jung Jaeil compose the score for the Oscar-winning Parasite, but his subsequent gig, Squid Game, has just stormed into…
by Brooks Riley I was there when they first went up. From my south-facing bedroom on Morton Street in the village, I watched them grow, floor by floor, to a height unimaginable for that time. When they were finished, I began to measure their height against their distance from my bedroom. If they fell over,…
by Brooks Riley There are momentary flashes in the aesthetic life of an individual which can’t be explained away by the exigencies of personal taste or the broader parameters of gender-biased inclinations. These random epiphanies may or may not have their roots in a psychologically identifiable pantheon of ‘likes’, but when they occur, they yank…
by Brooks Riley Time is a double-jointed trickster, bending this way and that to elude the tempi of one’s needs. Time isn’t what it used to be. The pandemic has altered our perception of it. This is why time is no longer quite as valuable as it was before we were suddenly assaulted with too…
by Brooks Riley Of all the secondary discomforts imposed by the pandemic, the most treacherous may be inertia. Life, interrupted, can be characterized as an absence of movement, like a stream that stops running, stagnating as the surface begins to cloud with algae and other still-standing detritus. Inertia that stems from the current situation can…
by Brooks Riley We are not where we were one year ago—or have we just returned? This is the paradox of the pandemic: Lockdown has sent many of us on the wildest of journeys—not to a different place, but to a different self, even if such a destination is temporary. What if a consequence of…
by Brooks Riley The first time I ever left home without leaving home I was twelve years old, recently back from a winter trip to Mexico. Routinely sent to bed at 8 pm (my parents were old and old-fashioned), always wondering how to fill the inevitable two hours of insomnia, I opted to return to…
by Brooks Riley On January 28th of this year, just as the biggest black swan event of the century was about to unfold, the South Korean band BTS debuted their latest single Black Swan on CBS’s Late Late Show. Looking back on this moment of Jungian synchronicity, one might be tempted to ask, ‘How did…
by Brooks Riley Being Korean is a behavioral science all its own. There are formalities at all levels of society and potential affronts lurking in every social engagement. Ageism is set in stone, and in honorifics that define older or younger persons, friends, siblings and relatives, as well as differing levels of social standing. Personal…
by Brooks Riley Something has happened in the last forty days. The planet has gone quiet, a vast, reverberating, gesticulating global chorus suddenly muted by something wee and invisible which is borne across continents, streets and rooms by friends and strangers. Mass extinction, once the whispered woe of a distant future, suddenly sounds louder and…
by Brooks Riley 1. As the coronavirus continues to disrupt human life in many corners of the globe, a phrase from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah has wormed its way through the background noise of my attention span. It occurs in a Part III recitative usually sung by a bass with enough gravitas to shake the…
by Brooks Riley When Vienna‘s Albertina Museum exhibition of works by Albrecht Dürer ended in January 2020, it seemed quite possible that several of the masterpieces on display might never again be seen by the public, among them The Great Piece of Turf. This may sound like a dire prediction for a fragile work that…
by Brooks Riley A long time ago, on a mountainside in Liechtenstein, I tuned my transistor radio to the Deutschlandfunk, one of neighboring Germany’s state radio stations whose broadcast range leaked into that tiny country. This is what I heard: Hier ist der Deutschlandfunk, heute aus der Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. It wasn’t…
by Brooks Riley Now that the Emmys are over and we Americans have patted ourselves and a few Brits on the back for outstanding work, it’s time to consider one of the grandest achievements of the past year, a Netflix series from South Korea called Mr. Sunshine, which has, inexplicably, been ignored by media critics…
by Brooks Riley It’s not every day that a small, unexpected masterpiece shows up in your mailbox, arriving with the same modest ‘ping’ that announces the other electronic missives. This was no ordinary masterpiece. It was the photograph of a detail from Luca Signorelli’s fresco La Fine del Mondo on the entrance wall of La…
by Brooks Riley Racing down a German autobahn at impossible speeds is like running past a smorgasbord when you don’t have time to eat. Exit signs fly by, pointing to delicious, iconic destinations that whet the appetite but that one has no time for: Hameln, Wittenberg, Quedlinburg, Eisenach, Erfurt, Altenburg, Jena, Weimar, Dessau—markers of histories…
