WEB EXCLUSIVE: Paul Julian Smith (Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY) discusses Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In with FQ editor Rob White.

Every spring for the past ten years I have been visiting Turin in the spring to teach some seminars. With a bit of luck and good management I can make my visits coincide with May Day, which in Italy in general and Turin in particular is celebrated with proper ceremony and a sense of history.

Poison tells three tales about ostracism. In “Horror,” an experimental serum turns an overzealous scientist into a plague-carrier; this storyline is filmed in the style of trashy “psychotronic” B-movies such as Glen or Glenda and Carnival of Souls with a touch also of Samuel Fuller…

Voices are heard in Film Socialisme but often the speaker is not seen; conversations are decontextualized to the point of absurdity. The line between epigrammatic and nonsensical is impossible to draw.

When he saw the clouds moving around the mountain like a wheel and had the cameraman take several shots of them, Abel Gance must have been ecstatic.

FEATURES: Interviews with Janus Metz and with Dai Sil Kim-Gibson; an analysis of films about financial meltdown; and reviews of Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.

READ: Bad Blood; Poison: Caviar and Ketchup; Three Endings; and Pope-Shrinking