‘Making a movie is casting a spell,’ said Kenneth Anger about his lifelong profession, his unique and spectacular talent, his very own dark magic. That certainly describes how I was lured into his realm. There was a time in my life where I would watch Anger’s seven-minute film Rabbit’s Moon basically on repeat, infatuated by its blue-tinted images of a sprightly harlequin dancing around a clearing and calling silently to the moon. It was poetry.

Watching noir all month, in its many transcontinental variants from the past eighty-odd years, really is a fantastic thing to do. I’m finding connections between films that aren’t obvious, or that might not appear to me without the benefit of such programming and framing.

I’m devastated about Agnès Varda’s death, not only because the world has lost a great light but because she was still making art, and we’ve lost what she still had left to give us.

Women in cinema have had their moments, but it’s mostly white men who are always pushed to the fore. In recent years, though, there has been something of a return to women – a gesture towards a different, perhaps kinder, cinema, and a gesture towards women as a whole (as subjects and audiences).

In the pilot episode of Feud, Joan Crawford’s beautician says, scathingly, ‘Men age, they get character. Women age, they get lost.’

In his first scene in Aloha, the film’s only featured Hawaiian character Dennis ‘Bumpy’ Kanahele wears a t-shirt that declares himself ‘Hawaiian by birth’ – on the back, though, it reads ‘American by force’. This force has continued to force Bumpy, and so many non-white actors, to the margins.

The English writer Cyril Connolly once wrote that everything was a dangerous drug to him, except for reality, which was unendurable. Whether he wrote it with irreverence or despair I’m not sure, but it describes the trap that lies between depression and addiction.