Picture Cycle

Picture Cycle is a brilliant work of cultural criticism. At once lyrical and incisively analytical, it investigates, with great acuity, intellectual range, and undercurrent of mourning, “the new emotional schematic,” where lives and screens become hauntingly inseparable. In essays that reach back into pre-digital childhood and fast forward into an ever-spreading simulacrum, Masha Tupitsyn’s gaze is always vibrant, curious, and compellingly alert to the telling detail and revealing contradiction. These formally inventive essays bring to mind both Gertrude Stein and John Berger, as they illuminate with beauty and tenderness a world that “stopped being The World and became something else.”

Masha Tupitsyn’s Picture Cycle is not just a socio-political argument for formal complexity, it is also an artwork that pushes criticism, art, and philosophy towards the immaterial, spectral, and sublime while maintaining exemplary attention to formal detail. Pressing against our lossless digital surfaces, Tupitsyn uncovers cuts, dissolves, frames, gaps, and junctures that revive our capacity for making sense.

Masha Tupitsyn’s Picture Cycle rescues films of our generation from the memory hole to which everything but box office is now consigned. Her writing is intimate and analytical, laced with radiant perceptions about movie stars, memory, and lost time.

Words which cut through the noise of our time with precision, clarity, and elegance. Tupitsyn’s singular essays shape shift between analysis, intervention, critique, and lyric essay, meeting her subject matter where it needs to be met. Tupitsyn makes the familiar unfamiliar once again and, at their best, her essays return and transform their subjects back into the strange, unfamiliar, unknown things they once were when we first encountered them.

Masha Tupitsyn, a writer, critic, and multimedia artist, teaches film and literature at the New School. She is the author of Like Someone in Love- An Addendum to Love Dog, Love Dog, LACONIA- 1,200 Tweets on Film, and Beauty Talk & Monsters (Semiotext(e)e), and coeditor of the anthology Life As We Show It- Writing on Film. Her 24-hour film Love Sounds is an audio-essay and history of love in English-speaking cinema. Her ongoing essay film DECADES is a history of cinematic sound and scores organized by decade.Kevin Killian was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. Recent books include the poetry collections Tony Greene Era and Tweaky Village. He is the coauthor of Poet Be Like God- Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. With Dodie Bellamy, he coedited Writers Who Love Too Much- New Narrative Writing, 1977-1997.