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 Richard Wagner’s mammoth Ring of the Nibelung cycle begins with a single note—not a chord, or series of notes, or leitmotif—but an extended E flat so deep it could be mistaken for noise, or the rumblings of Earth giving birth to tragedy. Hours later, this Ur sound, produced by eight contrabassi over…
by Brooks Riley 1. Reality isn’t what it used to be. Neither is fiction. Years ago, someone who worked for a daily soap opera production company told me that if a storyline included a wedding, the TV network and its stations would be inundated with wedding gifts for the fictional newlyweds—from fans unable to distinguish…
by Brooks Riley I didn’t plan to write about Caspar David Friedrich for his 250th birthday. He belongs to a different time in my life and a different aesthetic pathology. But as the date edged closer, I found myself missing that impossible reach for the sublime that his work had once provoked in me. I…
by Brooks Riley One of nature’s most endearing parlor tricks is the ripple effect. Drop a pebble into a lake and little waves will move out in concentric circles from the point of entry. It’s fun to watch, and lovely too, delivering a tiny aesthetic punch every time we see it. It’s also the well-worn…
by Brooks Riley Something odd happens when I look at the elder Pieter Bruegel’s paintings: I experience a jolt of vertigo, as though I’d stepped out on a ledge somewhere—not too high up, but high enough to initiate a physical reaction more like titillation than terror. I didn’t notice this right away: For a long…
by Brooks Riley Ems, 17 June 1880 “This morning I took a long walk with Papa . . . judging by this morning, a more awfull profusion, diffusion, infusion and confusion of colours it is difficult to imagine . . . the Britishers especially excell in this art and their colours are put together as…
by Brooks Riley ‘Wenn möglich, bitte wenden.’ That was the voice of the other woman in the car, ‘If possible, please turn around.’ She was nowhere to be seen in the BMW I was riding in sometime in the early aughts, but her voice was pleasant—neutral, polite, finely modulated and real. She was the voice…
by Brooks Riley 1. In nature the act of listening is primarily a survival strategy. More intense than hearing, listening is a proactive tool, affording animals a skill with which to detect predators nearby (defense mechanism), but also for predators to detect the presence and location of prey (offense mechanism). My favorite listener of all…
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…