Aristotle famously argues that you do not really know something unless you know its four causes. The four causes are: the material (the component matter of a thing), the form (something is what it is because it shares in a universal form), the efficient (the thing that creates another thing, for example, your parents created you), and lastly the telos (the end or function that the thing was created to fulfill).

Just when I become comfortable with the idea that American narrative film has died; that it has finally suffocated from its lack of vision and its infatuation with Hollywood fashion, including the so-called indie cinema, a burst of fresh air suddenly hits me in the face.

There is a tendency among publications that deal with high culture, like this one, to ignore mass culture.

Stephen Eric Bronner, senior editor of Logos, an interdisciplinary Internet journal, is Professor of Political Science and a member of the Graduate Faculties of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Rutgers University.

Review of Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker
by Stan Brakhage (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company, 2003)