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169 SECONDS. What does it mean to human? Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges about two out-of-luck hitmen is a bleak and humorous genre film that seeks to answer that question. The film is essentially a tale of compassion and love in the face of absurdity and frailty. In this jubilee instalment of 169 Seconds Jesper Haarup Borchmann highlights the humanism of In Bruges.

169 SECONDS. Film narratives often follow a logic of causality, with one incident naturally leading to another. In Ruben Östlund’s The Square (2017) we seem to witness such typical relations of cause and effect, yet the narrative gradually spirals out of control: actions do have consequences, but in the truly plural sense of one action leading to more than one outcome. In this jubilee installment of 169 Seconds, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard explores the film’s narrative mechanisms.

PODCAST. I anledning af at 16:9 her i 2023 fejrer sit tyvende år, ser redaktørerne Mathias Bonde Korsgaard og Jakob Isak Nielsen tilbage på filmtidsskriftets udvikling i tidens løb og diskuterer hvordan det afspejler filmkritikkens generelle udvikling i den samme periode.

169 SECONDS. What is it that filmmaking does to our relation to time and place? In this installment of the jubilee series of 169 seconds, Steffen Moestrup embarks on a small essayistic journey along with Margaret Tait to reflect on the question of cinematic - and worldly - time and place.

169 SECONDS. In this installment of our jubilee series of 169 Seconds, Catherine Grant collects mirror and reflection sequences from the 2017 Chilean film Una mujer fantástica and ponders their significance in this narrative of queer melancholia and mourning. The film stars Daniela Vega, a trans actress and mezzo-soprano, who, in the closing moments of the film, sings the song that accompanies the essay: “Ombra mai fu”, the opening aria from Händel’s 1738 opera Serse.

169 SECONDS. In Sebastian Lelios The Wonder from 2022 the initial camera movement quite literally takes us from the film studio where the film is shot and into the world of the English nurse Elizabeth Wright in 18th century Ireland. Do you wonder how?

169 SECONDS. In this wonderful instalment of 169 Seconds, made in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of 16:9, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin explore Abel Ferrara's independent film Go Go Tales (2007), focusing on its use of Dreyer-like long takes and tour de force performances. In Go Go Tales, Ray Ruby (Willem Dafoe) is desperate, but in one particular scene Ferrara and Dafoe deliver a small miracle. All we have to do is watch and wait.

169 SECONDS. In the second installment of our jubilee series of 169 Seconds, Jason Mittell leans into the parametric possibilities offered by the series. Through 16 video clips from Breaking Bad, with a new one appearing every 9 seconds, the video evokes the affective experience of Walter White’s story.

169 SECONDS. At 16:9 we are celebrating our 20th anniversary this year with a series of 169 Seconds video essays about films, series, documentaries, etc. made since the journal was launched in 2003. In this first installment, Barbara Zecchi traces unlikely intertextual connections between four notable dance scenes in Dogtooth, Raw, Titane and Ema.

169 SECONDS. This installment of 169 Seconds by Barbara Zecchi deconstructs the controversial ending of Scott and Khouri’s Thelma and Louise by putting it into an improbable intertextual dialogue with two other unrelated films—namely Vittorio De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano (1951) and Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982).