man idly whittles fingernail with razor . . . goes on porch outside . . . looks at sky . . . (switch to sky) . . . three thin clouds slice horizontally over a full moon . . . (girl’s face on screen) . . . moon again . . . (girl’s face again) . . . hand of man lifts eye and slits it neatly with razor . . . closeup of gore. . . Buried in one of her diaries, this is a 19-year-old Sylvia Plath’s sketch of the famous eyeball bisection scene in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929).

The poet’s description is at once lucid and gap-ridden—eaten up by the essential delay between images and vision, thoughts and hands. Plath’s jottings capture what is, to me, one of the most thrilling aspects of film criticism: the sensation that the critic is forever failing to catch up, as if moving through honey in a strobe-lit hive. Something emerges from this failure. Phrases and images alike become twisted. Here, clouds slice. Moons repeat. Hands precede their men.

In This Little Art (2017), Kate Briggs pinpoints how literary translation has been dismissed as a kind of reproductive labour, dependent on and inferior to an original creative act. As she argues, in actuality translation “complicates the authorial position: sharing it, usurping it, sort of dislocating it,” as its own fantasy (in which German and Spanish, Japanese and English can switch without consequence) is imposed onto another’s fiction. However doomed, writing about film is also an act of translation. It platforms, disperses, and clarifies at the same time as it warps, obscures, and mystifies.

And so, as editors of film publications everywhere are being forced to say goodbye after years of devoted labour amidst plunging (or never existent) resources, it’s with a giddy faith in this medium’s ability to metamorphose failure that I welcome you back to Rough Cut. It was by reading Rough Cut as a teenager that I realised that film criticism could live beyond resolution and authority, making the slippery stage of psychic processing into something communal—a cinema basement of echoes and dreams. I won’t forget being struck by Michelle Wang’s response to Jonathon Glazer’s Under the Skin (2014), which begins with a poem-diagram of language being funnelled into a sinkhole, before her analysis gathers the universe back up in pieces, with subheadings as exhilarating as ‘sound’, ‘interactions’ and ‘meaning’.

I’d like to thank Rough Cut’s previous Managing Editors, Valerie Ng and Debbie Zhou, as well as its entire founding team—Ivana Brehas, Samuel Harris, Eliza Janssen, André Shannon, and Claire White—for their extreme trust and generosity in passing the site over to me as its new Managing Editor and the brilliant Tiia Kelly as Commissioning Editor. It is truly a testament to the open-hearted ethic of Rough Cut‘s founders that they have allowed and encouraged us to adopt their site, rich as it is with history and potential. I’m so grateful for your gentle guidance both into this role and into writing about film altogether.

With a fervour for the underground and overlooked, in 2024 we’ll resume Rough Cut’s programming with coverage of Australian festivals, filmmaker interviews, and reviews of fresh releases. Amongst other experiments, we will also be launching new columns, collaborating with poets, and delving into all manners of niche and neurosis. Fittingly, our first destination was the Melbourne edition of Obsessions, a single-screen festival by the Brunswick-based distribution company Static Vision, which you can expect to read about in the coming week.

We look forward to seeing you at the movies!

Until soon,

Indigo Bailey

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Indigo Bailey is a Tasmanian writer and editor living in Melbourne. In 2023, she received the Island Nonfiction Prize for an essay about rain sound. She has written for Island Magazine, The Guardian, Voiceworks, and Kill Your Darlings, among other publications, but first she was published by Rough Cut.