Amber Walker

Amber Can Walk — Rosemary Woodhouse is naive. Rosemary Woodhouse is in denial. Ira Levin's seminal novel, Rosemary's Baby, [...] asks the reader to believe in sacrifice and begs us not to trust its promise of a shinier, better world. Levin barely lingers on what the satanic spawn is materially for, simply that he exists to usher in a beginning [...] Organised religion and patriarchy are skewered by the inversion of the birth of Christ, with our Mary being just...Rosemary. A young woman who wanted a nice marriage, a nice baby and an apartment like the ones in magazines. She's just like you.

Amber Can Walk — The sex comedy as a genre has existed as a mound of flesh hanging from the romantic comedy, not sordid enough to be considered pornography, and not mature enough to challenge ideas about sex and relationships with precision. The lack of precision with these kinds of films is often their appeal, floating through riotous vignettes, glued together by a meagre plot, all to explore pleasures both relatable and otherwise. The goal is never to truly upend sexual hierarchy but to jab at it and see if it explodes. Covered in a variety of fluids, the protagonists often learn something about life, friendship, themselves, and this exploration never diverts too hard from leering at hot babes and getting your dick wet. With the rise in popularity of home video, it's no surprise that Gen X in particular had a glut of these to devour.

Amber Can Walk — Chang's early work in particular finds its roots in performance, riot grrrl feminism and a provocative criticism of orientalist myths, all of which are merged within an imagist sensibility of recording the immediate present as concisely as possible. Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic are both potent influences for Chang's work, though I can also see flourishes of the Patty Chang ouevre in Valie Export's …Remote… Remote… (1973) and Hannah Wilke's Gestures (1974). All of these artists centred the morphing and even desecration of their own bodies as a mode of expression. Chang's video art in particular incorporated the outrageous punk sensibilities of the 1990s, hilarious and discomfiting, whilst also displaying a keen desire for a more tactile, embodied world, all of which was ironically mediated through the lens of a camera. Whether using fruit to represent her breast and scooping the flesh out to eat it, using sparkling water to shave her pubic hair or placing eels inside her shirt and sitting for an uncomfortable amount of time, Chang could not be separated from her provocations. She literally was them.

Amber Can Walk — The holiday in the sun becomes a fantasy space in which neuroses are free to play. In the real world, we must work and emote and socialise, but in this pretend space, we are free from our schedules and rules. It's fascinating to position the holiday itself as a freedom from having to be a person, with Vanessa mostly lounging on her balcony or static in her bed, refusing to be touched. Furthermore, the environment exists for these characters, fiction positioned as innately solipsistic. Even the owner of the bar is really a metaphor for the main characters' marriage, his dead wife displaced to a photo which he covertly kisses just in view of Roland to spy on and document for his art. Everything is material for the story, everything is important, Jolie asserts. The humanity is absent because the book is still trying to flourishes under the clumsy emotions of these pathetic little people. In the absence of good literature to devour, Vanessa's only pastime is looking - off the balcony, over the cliff and at her own personal television, also know as the very convenient hole in the wall where a beautiful French couple on their honeymoon are always relaxing and fucking.

Amber Can Walk — Her films transcend the cinema screen into discourse, turning movies into moments into eventual cringing at why you cared so much about such an empty thing. Fennell creates maximalist chewing gum - you love it for its flavour and you don't expect it to be a meal that keeps you full. For me, her work can be catergorised as "multiplex pop pulp", drawing on the disposability of pulp narratives and the thievery of mainstream culture that was prominent in the Pop Art movement.

Amber Can Walk — After The Hunt isn't about silence. This is a film about people who talk too much so they don't have to reflect on what it is that they are saying. Set intermittently in a philosophy class, a therapist's office, a bedroom, our characters are used to approaching the world from a theoretical point of view [...] Because these discussions have thus far been limited to the hypothetical, none of them, but especially Alma, are prepared to be the principled person they are required to be, as they are used to being materially untethered from violence in the shelter of the university halls.

Amber Can Walk — My favourite entries in Wood's filmography are the horror pieces [...] Each is distinct, and yet they are all stacked to the brim with signifiers of genre. Fog and candles and skulls. Lightning and graveyards and vampiric women wandering through the darkness. Characters in search of something they will never quite hold onto. Freaks and criminals and monsters, far more compelling than the perfunctory 'protagonist', who only really exists to describe how unnerving the events of the film are going to be. Wood signals to you with every frame that you are currently, in this moment, watching a horror film, knowing that you came here to fill your plate with all the trimmings. You may not be scared, but you won't leave empty handed.

Amber Can Walk — The Canyons (2013) is a hard film to like. It has a consistent yellow and green tinge, like stagnant pool water left to stew on the hottest day of the year. Everything is over-lit and cheap looking, empty and un-erotic. It's dry, garish and much too close to the sun. The dust settled on the cinema seats is hot to the touch. Paul Schrader's attempt to unravel the erotic thriller by aiming white-hot, high-definition fury at the supposed cesspool of the film industry did not enamour; it revolted people with its refusal to be immersive. The movie compels me because it doesn't seem to be for anyone. It simply persists.

Amber Can Walk — About a month ago, I saw The Shrouds (2024) in the cinema for the first time. After ruminating on it, posting a quick review to Letterboxd and eating some very mediocre sushi, I found myself, periodically crying throughout the rest of the evening and well into the early hours of the morning. This, unfortunately, ruined the unintentional double feature I did with Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (2024), a film I remember very little about, but have the vague sense that I did, in fact, like it. It wasn't for the lack of quality that the details of this fluffy little movie slipped away, but rather due to me having what I will euphemistically call a 'bad turn'.

Amber Can Walk — Internet horror has continuously evolved as the average user's sense of fear has morphed with the exposure to graphic real-world horrors. Most multimedia horror - whether short stories, ARGs or strange blurred images - exists to be memefied, with a parallel sense of irony and naïveté, and an awareness that the sincerity of these works only really enhances them. As with the horror genre in general, an unwillingness to buy into the premise and atmosphere only really reflects badly on you, not the work itself.

Amber Can Walk — [W]e've entered a uniquely distressing era of gender psychosis, only stoked and magnified by the ghouls running the various social media sites, funneling whichever moral panic you fancy directly into your brain every day all the time. [...] This is the context under which Adolescence raptured its audience, who are unsurprisingly looking for any kind of answers to what seems like a runaway train that we are already too late in stopping. How have we lost control of our young men and what can be done to solve it? Unfortunately, this compelling set of 4 hours will not save the world, bring closure or even really satisfy your urge to see justice take place. In a lot of ways, it seeks to frustrate everyone who could be watching looking for answers as well as those are just looking for something quick and satisfying to breeze through. It's a show that refuses closure and simplicity, and it remains wooly if this was the correct approach for a topic this culturally relevant.

Amber Can Walk — Like most people who have encountered her, the first film I watched from Suzan Pitt was Asparagus (1979). It's by far her most well-known movie, having previously been billed as a double feature with Eraserhead (1977) and finding a second life amongst the Criterion Channel/Mubi stalkers, looking to also uncover well-made gems created by weird little freaks from history. Asparagus is a materialisation of the artistic process through an extremely dynamic and simulataneously mundane depiction of a woman creating her art and then presenting it to an audience. In between fantasy and reality nestles Pitt's depiction of creativity, sexuality and personal image, with the main character finding as much fulfilment from organising her dollhouse as when she attends the theatre to present her art showcase.

Amber Can Walk — I wish I was able to report particularly strong feelings about Babygirl (2024). Maybe I needed something deeply troubling or raunchy or offensive to knock me out of my apathetic mundanity. To a certain extent, I would have liked to have been taken aback by a film whose marketing threatened to shake up discourse about sex in cinema. Instead, I have come to realise that this film is simply the memefied, somewhat middling aesthetic exercise of the month and not much more.

ambercanwalk.com — The home invasion narrative is fundamentally about the perceived safety of the inner sphere and how violence seeps in from the outside, forcing you to question what these four walls have had you repressing the whole time you believed you were safe. Knock Knock is a film about men who don't believe they are a danger to women and that if they remain passive and compliant with the demands of masculinity and fatherhood, they will be able to retain the image of themselves as a 'good guy'.

Amber Can Walk — A personal account of the way four different films cement my feelings on loneliness and perversion.

ambercanwalk.com — All of her films seemed to breathe the idea that women were worth telling stories about and, more importantly, that these stories could be told outside of Hollywood, for a fraction of the price, all whilst retaining the elements that would undoubtedly be removed to not offend the audience.

ambercanwalk.com — In the middle of 1975, Christine Chubbuck, a Florida-based television news reporter, made history in being the first person to die by suicide on live TV. Earlier this year, I watched Christine (2016) and Kate Plays Christine (2016) in succession after I realised they were both about Chubbuck. I don't mean to become fixated on troubled public figures and have become wary of my attachment to those who have committed suicide in particular. Much like true crime, the media on Chubbuck has become the only language we have to discuss her death, how public it was, how lonely.

Screen Queens — Hotel is very much a film where nothing happens. Despite the trappings of anticipation, there is nothing tangible about the horrors. Oftentimes, it feels like an articulation of the ineffable, like trying to explain to someone why something scared you after the fact, only to have it sound childish and inarticulate, unable to convey the very real fear you experienced. The isolation of being unable to make new coworkers like you and the dread of menial labour with very little pay attached will not be scary to everyone and in terms of traditional horror, the lack of an actual killer is a flaw. But there is something so specific and so stomach churning about the repetition of the film, about the empty spaces consumed with darkness, and the inability to find catharsis in the ending.

Amber Can Walk — I like sex comedies in particular because they hinge on you not taking them seriously. On laughing at the messy moments of sexuality and at yourself for taking it all so seriously.

Gayly Dreadful — The legacy of witches is an inherently gendered one. It cannot be separated from its stereotypes and from the inherent fear of aberrational women. By extension, witches are often described as failed, wayward women, transgressing the bounds of patriarchy, intentionally flouting the rules of womanhood or worse, having their womanhood stripped from them by way of caricatures. They are grotesque. They are a danger to your children. They will harm you if you venture too deep into the woods.

Amber Can Walk — I wanted to do a fully comprehensive piece on the appeal of disturbing cinema but it never really came together, despite my research and effort, and I was really disappointed because I do feel I have a lot to say about what I personally find disturbing and why I often like films in spite of this.

Amber Can Walk — The way the camera is used in this movie, the way it switches from the calm of Angela's home to the queasy, fast-paced outside world, confirms a feeling of never-ending fear. Women in horror and thrillers are often made to feel crazy for reacting negatively to gendered violence, so this hysteria transplanted into the midst of lock-down validates the general feeling of insanity that occurred when we were trapped in our houses.

Amber Can Walk — I think one of the most insulting parts of the biopic for me was the film's complete unwillingness to admit that Marilyn was good at what she did. If it wasn't outright insulting her abilities, it implied that what she was doing wasn't acting at all but instead an extension of her inherited mental illness. In one foul swoop, Blonde was able to insult Monroe herself, actors, women and mentally ill people!

Amber Can Walk — In her second documentary feature, Violet Du Feng, along with co-director Qing Zhao, present a story of a language struggling to stay alive. Hidden Letters (2022) follows three women who all have a passion for Nüshu, a language created and used exclusively by women during a period of time in China where women were confined to the house and unable to communicate openly with one another about their lives. The film connects the three women in their love of the language and its ability to quietly articulate the way women suffered and continue to suffer under patriarchy. Furthermore, it seeks to highlight the methods women have had to take to create art, turning their poetry and songs into this script so that they may be preserved only for the eyes of women more free than them in the future. Altogether, it's a moving and radical portrayal of intergenerational sisterhood, and I was glad to watch during BFI London Film Festival this year.