A Mistrust of Arrival

About this book

Inside. Inside these pages. Inside an asthmatic kid's locked room. Inside a writer's head. We all know there's only one way out, but in the meantime an engagement with art might offer some solace, and the engagements Steve Mitchell offers in A Mistrust of Arrival are nothing short of reasons to carry on, to get outside. The call-them-essays in this book think about art (generally but not exclusively film art) and they use movies to manipulate the psychic space in a writer's memory of a younger self. Films interrogate Mitchell's life just as Mitchell questions and responds to the moving images he encounters throughout his life. This is a give-and-take of the highest order and the filmmakers whose work is here used might well feel the rare joy of being "read" seriously and thrill at the depth of intellectual and emotional response to their work this book brings. This is art criticism as revelation of self. It believes that art might matter and that it might matter enough to change your life. And you might find the keys to all the locked doors in the schlocky horror of The Brain That Wouldn't Die or in the 4 hours and 47 minutes of Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World. Either way, the subtle intensity of Mitchell's writing will offer you an interior passage to the beautiful world.