In these sections, I’ll be making humble suggestions for fascinating reading I’ve stumbled across and think might interest others.

You can expect me to mention Southland Tales again, because I love the layering and intertextuality of it. A plot synopsis alone would take about 50 pages, let alone a true deconstruction. But this guy takes a good run at rationalising the devices of Kelly’s vertigo-inducing self-referentiality. I highly encourage both fans and detractors of the movie to read this (the uninitiated should be aware that this essay is loaded with spoilers).

I also recently discovered Errol Morris’s blog over at NYT online. Morris is my favourite documentarian going way back – he’s probably the best working. His objects of fixation are things like perception, memory, history, judgement, the reliability of photography, human behaviour.

The particular essay I’m linking to here is a 3-part exploration of a pair of photographs taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean war. Morris tries to deduce which of the photographs (if any) was “staged,” ultimately travelling to the Valley of the Shadow of Death, near Sebastopol, in search of a definitive answer. Why? To answer, conclusively, whether Fenton was dishonest, whether he staged a photo, and which of the photos has integrity. I’m linking to Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 separately, because the links at the tops of the articles weren’t working when I read it.

Finally, I was blown away after spotting this – I spent hours going through every entry; there’s 400 exhibits here, pretty much all of them amazing. This, this and this are particularly captivating, but really, the 400 entries run such a gamut of clever design that trying to sample is absurd – you really should peruse them all.