TEN SKIES

In the fourth title of our Decadent Editions series, Dennis Lim explores the oeuvre of South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo via his 2005 film.Ten shots of the sky, each ten minutes long. That’s all it takes to describe James Benning’s film from 2004. And yet, this simplicity conceals a rich and absorbing drama, one of the great works of the American avant-garde. Scholar and critic Erika Balsom unfolds its hidden intricacies of meaning, extending its lessons with crystalline prose, a comparable sense of depths, and an exhilarating, maximalist intimation of what criticism can do and become. She brings you from the film itself into the mind of the artist, through philosophical musings and art historical scholarship. The book is part of a Decadent Editions series of 10 books about 10 films.

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The Decadent Editions is a series of ten books about ten films, one for every year of the 2000s.

Each a deep dive into a single film, the ten book-length essays shift attention away from entrenched classics and the churn of mainstream releases, spotlighting milestones of contemporary cinema. These idiosyncratic studies, by some of today’s most compelling cultural critics, are ambitious and insightful, yet playful and inviting.

Together they offer an eclectic view of cinema in the first ten years of the new millennium – a decade now ripe for reappraisal.

Author Erika Balsom
Cover and book layout James Geoffrey Nunn
First edition 2021
Pp. 216
ISBN 9780645454703
Language EN