Therapy

Fontessa

Fontessa is the Modern Jazz Quartet’s 1956 Atlantic debut: their first formal guest collaboration (with Jimmy Giuffre), their first album after moving from Prestige, and their first recording following their 1956 European debut tour. The 11-minute title suite was composed by John Lewis and inspired by Commedia dell’arte, with its four characters illustrated on the cover. Lewis described it as a suite whose sketchy plot invites improvisation. The Prelude opens and closes the work. Harlequin is evoked by vibraphone improvisation in older jazz style. Pierrot appears in piano-led 'less older jazz'. Pantaloon emerges in drum-led 'still later jazz', developing the main motif. Colombine is represented by the recurring three-note 'Fontessa' motif. The mono version was issued in the USA on Atlantic’s black label, catalogue number 1231. The stereo release contained technical flaws: mains hum, tape hiss, and reduced bass level.

69 Love Songs

69 Love Songs is the Magnetic Fields’ sixth studio album, released on September 7, 1999, by Merge Records. It is a three-volume concept album comprising 69 love songs, all written by Stephin Merritt. Conceived as a theatrical revue inspired by Stephen Sondheim and Charles Ives’ 114 Songs, it was composed largely at Dick’s Bar in New York. The album features ukulele, banjo, accordion, cello, mandolin, flute, xylophone, Marxophone, synthesizers, guitars, and effects. Shirley Simms, Dudley Klute, L.D. Beghtol, and Claudia Gonson each sing lead on six songs; Daniel Handler plays accordion; Christopher Ewen serves as guest arranger/synthesist. It is the band’s best-known work.

For Your Pleasure

For Your Pleasure is Roxy Music’s second studio album, released in March 1973. It was recorded in February 1973 at AIR Studios in Oxford Circus, London. Roxy Music self-produced it with Chris Thomas; John Middleton and John Punter handled audio engineering. The band spent more studio time on this album than on their debut, integrating Bryan Ferry’s songs with more elaborate production treatments. The title track ends with an elaborate fade-out using tape loop effects. Amanda Lear, Ferry’s girlfriend at the time, was photographed with a black jaguar for the front cover, while Ferry appears on the back cover as a dapper chauffeur standing behind a limousine. It marked the beginning of Roxy Music’s long, successful collaboration with producer Chris Thomas. It was promoted with the non-album single 'Pyjamarama'. It is the final Roxy Music album to feature Brian Eno, who departed soon after the supporting tour ended.

After the Rehearsal

After the Rehearsal is a 1984 Swedish television film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, shot by Sven Nykvist and starring Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, and Lena Olin. Set entirely in a theatre rehearsal room, it traces a charged encounter between a veteran director and his lead actress — a meeting that triggers memories of her late mother, also his former lover and star. Drawing on Strindberg’s A Dream Play, it uses doubling, repetition, and minimal staging to explore inheritance, memory, and the blurred line between performance and lived experience.

Children of Paradise

Marcel Carné’s 1945 French romantic drama, written by Jacques Prévert and shot under Nazi occupation, follows courtesan Garance and the four men — mime, actor, criminal, aristocrat — who love her in 1830s Paris. Its 190-minute span balances theatrical grandeur with psychological restraint, using deep-focus cinematography, meticulous production design, and Arletty’s commanding stillness to explore love as asymmetry, art as resistance, and performance as identity.

Double Suicide

Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide adapts Chikamatsu’s 1721 puppet play into live action, preserving its theatrical grammar: kuroko in black manipulate the world around the lovers, sets remain deliberately artificial, and music by Tōru Takemitsu punctuates rather than soothes. Shima Iwashita plays both wife and courtesan, binding the film’s duality in performance. It is a rigorous, unsentimental study of obligation, debt, and the formal limits of agency — where suicide is not escape but the only sentence the world permits.

Farewell My Concubine

Farewell My Concubine follows two Peking opera performers across five decades of Chinese history. Their artistic partnership and fraught personal bond are tested by war, revolution, and ideological purges. Directed by Chen Kaige and starring Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li, it uses the formal rigour of opera as both subject and structure — tracing how discipline, repetition, and gesture sustain and ultimately shatter the self.

My Dinner with Andre

My Dinner with Andre (1981) is a 111-minute filmed dialogue between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, playing fictionalised versions of themselves over dinner in a Manhattan restaurant. Directed by Louis Malle, it unfolds as a single, sustained exchange about theatre, mysticism, fear, and everyday life — with no subplot, no visual digression, and no resolution beyond mutual understanding. Shot in Richmond, Virginia, and edited for rhythmic continuity rather than emphasis, it relies entirely on performance, writing, and acoustic intimacy. Its reputation rests on its formal rigour and philosophical candour.

Now, Voyager

Now, Voyager (1942) follows Charlotte Vale’s transformation from a cowed Boston heiress into a composed, quietly autonomous woman, guided by therapy, a transatlantic cruise, and a chaste, enduring bond with a married architect. Directed by Irving Rapper and starring Bette Davis, it avoids melodrama in favour of psychological precision, using Sol Polito’s lighting, Max Steiner’s score, and Casey Robinson’s adaptation to sustain tension in restraint. Its power lies in what it withholds — resolution, romance, catharsis — and what it insists upon: dignity as practice, care as continuity, and healing as ongoing recalibration.

Sawdust and Tinsel

Ingmar Bergman’s 1953 drama follows a struggling travelling circus in early-twentieth-century Scania. Ringmaster Albert Johansson and his mistress Anne confront financial ruin, marital rupture, and public humiliation, while clown Frost endures private shame. Shot by Sven Nykvist and Hilding Bladh in muted, unadorned compositions, the film treats the circus not as spectacle but as a site of embodied vulnerability — where dignity is performed, not possessed, and endurance replaces resolution.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape

Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 debut is a tightly controlled drama set in Baton Rouge, following a married couple, the wife’s sister, and a visiting friend whose videotaped interviews about female sexuality unsettle their relationships. Shot on a $1.2m budget, with deliberate pacing, flat natural lighting by Walt Lloyd, and a sparse Cliff Martinez score, it builds tension through understatement. It won the Palme d’Or, launched the 1990s US indie wave, and remains a benchmark for psychological realism — not as catharsis, but as sustained, uncomfortable attention.

Carl Rogers

Josef Stefan

Viktor Frankl

Paula Scher

Spectacle