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 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…
by Brooks Riley I didn’t buy popcorn, but I got a good seat—a window seat in an arrangement of four seats around a table. The window was large and wide, like a movie screen, and low enough to allow a comfortable view of the passing landscape, from track to sky. The train, a sleek white…
by Brooks Riley Remember the winter scarf? A long strip of knitted wool, the two ends knotted, crossed, or wrapped around the neck. I’ve worn them all my life, struggling to keep the ends from unwinding in a cold wind, or retrieving a loose end from my latte as I reach across a table to…
by Brooks Riley I had an uneasy feeling on the day of the Challenger launch in January 1986. My memory tells me that I didn’t even watch it live, although I had, growing up, watched early shots into space: Alan Shepherd, John Glenn, and later, the first manned flight to the moon. I was excited…
by Brooks Riley The first time I passed through the Berlin Wall into the German Democratic Republic, it was two days after Hitler’s master builder Albert Speer was released from Spandau prison. The Cold War was in full swing in the fall of 1966. I was travelling with a friend whose father was US ambassador…
by Brooks Riley I’m standing at the window looking north over a small garden with several different kinds of trees and bushes. If I refine my intake of visual information, I am, in fact, gazing at many different shades of green at once, perhaps even all of them (at least 57, like Heinz). There’s the…
by Brooks Riley Go on, admit it. You’ve always wanted to come back as a capybara. Why not? There are worst entities for a come-back kid when its mortal coil is taken up again. As a capybara you would live in a small community of peaceful vegans, free to join the party or to wander…
by Brooks Riley Jean-Luc Godard once inscribed a picture to me with these words: “This is the surface, Brooks, and that’s why it’s deep.” At the time, I was skimming the surface, darting from one life experience to another without stopping to sink down or dive deeper—or give his jeu de mots much thought. While…
by Brooks Riley Personal experiences of art should not be foisted on others except in small doses, given that words can only provide semantic guideposts to such an experience. That’s why I never wanted to write a companion piece to my earlier one‚ Holding Albrecht. But recently I found myself longing to see Albrecht Dürer’s…
by Brooks Riley Okay, I’m not a girl anymore. In many ways, I never was. I’m more interested in dendrites than dentists, bosons than Botox, solar energy than SPF factors, cosmology than cosmetics, physics than fitness, Leibniz than Lagerfeld. On the other hand, I’m enough of a girl that if I do watch a sport,…
by Brooks Riley In or around 1970: It was one of those humid hot nights in New York. At a party on someone’s brownstone roof, I was hawking my theory of how the world would end, to a couple of contemporaries I’d just met. It went like this: We would never be able to save…
by Brooks Riley Click to enlarge. As I hover over my life in cyberspace, I look down at the various trails emanating from me that find their way across the globe to multiple destinations, known and unknown, whether or not they were ever intended to travel that far. Interconnectivity has increased exponentially since 2009 when…