As the person who helps to choose our issue themes, I have to admit there is something un-evocative about Ten… maybe it’s the cold binary of 1 and 0, or the suggestion of an unattainable score (really, what is more uninspiring than perfection). Thankfully our writers are more imaginative than me and found in the number ten a purely cinematic element, the loving fragments of an undergraduate degree, a chaotic cocktail party, and an enigmatic date. But I am contractually obligated to introduce the issue with some of my own thoughts. So, in a Sheila Heti-esque spirit of randomness and arbitrary rules, I have decided to let the numbers do the work for me: I pulled the 9th through the 1st sentence (and then the 19th to the 11th) from all my previous editor’s notes (and one by managing editor, Sennah Yee) and laid them out here in descending order.
My father told a lawyer friend that it was ugly, overpowering and grim. Sit down and open a blank document, type “Issue X Editor's Note” at the top. It’s right after her pink dress is torn to shreds by her evil stepsisters, and she flees to go sob in the courtyard, resting her head on a stone bench. We like to think we are seeing the secret patterns or the “soul” of a work of art that can’t be replicated. When something scares us, it sticks around, morphing onto neuroses, predilections, and resilience. Of course, films can feel real, they can also feel like reality, or even worse, like a perfect form which your own life perpetually fails to match. I was a little disheartened a few years later when I noticed that countless other women had the same tattoo (it was like the dolphin on the ankle or the tribal armband of its time). Maybe it’s because our team is all Libras (a caveat: it’s only my moon), a sign characterized by indecision and ambivalence. This past year, no film filled me with more longing than Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life… Or How I Got Into An Argument (1996): the characters flit from acquaintances' apartments to bars, to dinner parties, to a friend’s home in the country.
That summer, I was in Paris and feeling lonely, so I went to a movie theatre to see something distracting. Crushes aren’t supposed to be attainable, anyway. This is a good time to let self-doubt creep in and stop writing altogether. Watching the footage of Elvis’ real performance that night, we see a certified star, he captivates effortlessly, he doesn’t have anything to prove. He thought I was being ridiculous, so did I. Maybe we stopped idolizing Harmony Korine’s “pure pop sociopaths”, but we started posting stills from Rohmer’s breezy, but no less aestheticized, summer visions: Pauline’s sexual education at the beach is as unreal in its refinement and maturity than the spring breakers are in their excesses. Or the many hearts in Moulin Rouge, a perpetual favourite and a film so unrestrained, beautiful, fake, corny, and true that you might think it invented the shape. Perhaps In the Mood is a study of parasocial cinema; more than anything our contributors are writing about their relationship to watching, relationships that are ambivalent, excessive, imaginary, unrequited, nostalgic. Orlando, bestowed with eternal life, has the unique position to live through centuries, to see the candles go out and the electric lights go on in London, to hear hooves on cobblestones fade into the rattling of streetcars, to see, we can imagine, the first films in a cinematograph.
Gabrielle Marceau
Editor-in-Chief, In The Mood Magazine
As the person who helps to choose our issue themes, I have to admit there is something un-evocative about Ten… maybe it’s the cold binary of 1 and 0, or the suggestion of an unattainable score (really, what is more uninspiring than perfection). Thankfully our writers are more imaginative than me and found in the number ten a purely cinematic element, the loving fragments of an undergraduate degree, a chaotic cocktail party, and an enigmatic date. But I am contractually obligated to introduce the issue with some of my own thoughts. So, in a Sheila Heti-esque spirit of randomness and arbitrary rules, I have decided to let the numbers do the work for me: I pulled the 9th through the 1st sentence (and then the 19th to the 11th) from all my previous editor’s notes (and one by managing editor, Sennah Yee) and laid them out here in descending order.
My father told a lawyer friend that it was ugly, overpowering and grim. Sit down and open a blank document, type “Issue X Editor's Note” at the top. It’s right after her pink dress is torn to shreds by her evil stepsisters, and she flees to go sob in the courtyard, resting her head on a stone bench. We like to think we are seeing the secret patterns or the “soul” of a work of art that can’t be replicated. When something scares us, it sticks around, morphing onto neuroses, predilections, and resilience. Of course, films can feel real, they can also feel like reality, or even worse, like a perfect form which your own life perpetually fails to match. I was a little disheartened a few years later when I noticed that countless other women had the same tattoo (it was like the dolphin on the ankle or the tribal armband of its time). Maybe it’s because our team is all Libras (a caveat: it’s only my moon), a sign characterized by indecision and ambivalence. This past year, no film filled me with more longing than Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life… Or How I Got Into An Argument (1996): the characters flit from acquaintances' apartments to bars, to dinner parties, to a friend’s home in the country.
That summer, I was in Paris and feeling lonely, so I went to a movie theatre to see something distracting. Crushes aren’t supposed to be attainable, anyway. This is a good time to let self-doubt creep in and stop writing altogether. Watching the footage of Elvis’ real performance that night, we see a certified star, he captivates effortlessly, he doesn’t have anything to prove. He thought I was being ridiculous, so did I. Maybe we stopped idolizing Harmony Korine’s “pure pop sociopaths”, but we started posting stills from Rohmer’s breezy, but no less aestheticized, summer visions: Pauline’s sexual education at the beach is as unreal in its refinement and maturity than the spring breakers are in their excesses. Or the many hearts in Moulin Rouge, a perpetual favourite and a film so unrestrained, beautiful, fake, corny, and true that you might think it invented the shape. Perhaps In the Mood is a study of parasocial cinema; more than anything our contributors are writing about their relationship to watching, relationships that are ambivalent, excessive, imaginary, unrequited, nostalgic. Orlando, bestowed with eternal life, has the unique position to live through centuries, to see the candles go out and the electric lights go on in London, to hear hooves on cobblestones fade into the rattling of streetcars, to see, we can imagine, the first films in a cinematograph.
Gabrielle Marceau
Editor-in-Chief, In The Mood Magazine