Dennis Lim's Remarkable "How Should a Pixel Be?"

A still from Alexandre Koberidze's Dry Leaf (2025)

Every now and then a review appears that is so original, so audacious, so delightful, it blows my mind. Namwali Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” is such a piece. And so is Patricia Lockwood’s “Malfunctioning Sex Robot.” And so is T. J. Clark’s recent “V is for Vagina.” Now comes Dennis Lim’s transfixing “How Should a Pixel Be?” in this month’s New York Review of Books. It’s a review of Alexandre Koberidze’s new film Dry Leaf. 

What is thrilling about Lim’s piece is that he defends what, for me, seems artistically indefensible, and that he does so brilliantly and persuasively. Dry Leaf, Lim tells us, was shot with the camera of a nearly twenty-year-old mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson W595. Lim says,

The W595 shoots video at fifteen frames per second—producing a choppier moving image than the customary twenty-four frames per second, deemed the minimum for perceived smoothness of motion—and a maximum resolution of 240 pixels, which is to say its images contain at least eighty times less visual information than the current 4K standard. 

Lim comments, “Even at the time it would have been inconceivable to use a camera like this, with its weak sensors and puny pixel counts, for any professional video production, let alone to shoot an entire feature film.” The result is a film consisting entirely of blurry images – an “unstable smear,” in Lim’s words. Who wants to watch that? Not me. I hate blurry images. I love sharp focus – the sharper the better. Lim is well aware of the issue. He quotes the scholar Martine Beugnet: “an unexpectedly blurry image draws attention to the workings of the camera; it risks undoing the illusion of reality.” Yes, exactly.

Dry Leaf is a road movie – “a quest narrative, in which a father travels the length and breadth of Georgia in search of his adult daughter, a sports photographer who has left home for reasons unknown.” This sounds like my kind of film. Why did Koberidze have to ruin it by using an outmoded camera that blurs everything? 

This is where Lim’s piece surprises. He loves Dry Leaf’s blur. He compares it to Impressionism:

Dry Leaf lingers at length on landscapes, on their flora and fauna, on the weather and light conditions that determine their legibility before the gaze of an easily overwhelmed camera. These soft, vague images are so distant from contemporary photographic realism that, for many, the reference that will first spring to mind is painting. Koberidze encourages this comparison with a few still lifes, directing our attention to, say, a plate of apples or a handful of freshly picked apricots. The landscapes at times evoke Impressionist and Post-impressionist vistas, the practically countable pixels suggesting the visible brushstrokes of impasto.

Okay, I can dig this. I love impasto. Lim continues,

Experienced as cinema, every frame of Dry Leaf enacts a drama of form. Figure and ground lose their distinctness. A smudge turns out to be a person, who seems to vanish before our eyes as they recede toward the horizon only to reappear moments later. Clouds take on serrated edges; power cables resemble dotted lines. The pixel, an unwanted video artifact, becomes a compositional element, a visible unit of information that periodically fills the screen with grids and gradients. Even apparently static shots are alive with contingency. Scenes in which nothing much happens are in fact trembling battles between darkness and light, as the camera struggles to adapt to its environment. The throbbing lag of the image, a result of digital compression, comes to seem like the very pulse of the movie, its electronic heartbeat. In its lack of nuance and tendency to overcorrect, the color range produces striking, often beautiful distortions: radioactive sunsets, a golden-hour glow. Paradoxically, the lo-fi aesthetic betrays a sensitivity to the atmospheric, or at least a compatibility with the gaseous and liquid states that Koberidze keeps returning to: the ever-present fog and mist of mountain terrain, the incessant flows of streams and waterfalls.

Lim makes me want to see this strange film. He calls Dry Leaf “a bet as well as an experiment”: “Koberidze’s wager is that these blurred images, to twenty-first-century eyes accustomed to the crisp edges of high definition, will be not just sufficient but replenishing.”

I never thought I’d see any value in a blurred image. Lim has persuaded me otherwise. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #5 Namwali Serpell's " 'She's Capital!' "

Taylour Paige as A'Ziah "Zola" King in Janicza Bravo's Zola

[I wrote this piece before I decided to stop blogging. I’ve decided to post it. I enjoy writing this series. I think I'll complete it. - J.M.] 

For me, one of the most transfixing movies of the 21st century so far is Janicza Bravo’s Zola (2021). It’s about a part-time Detroit stripper named Zola and the crazy, dangerous road trip she takes to Florida with another young stripper (Jessica), whom she’s only just met. The film pulses with unhinged action and has a jumpy, jazzy, spangled look. A title card near the beginning explains that Zola originated as a Twitter thread.

When I first saw Zola, I was stunned. What an extraordinary movie! Did others feel the same way? I sought reviews that might help me understand my response. Some were effusive in their praise. But they didn’t quite satisfy. Then I read Namwali Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” (The New York Review of Books, July 21, 2022). Boom! A great movie finds its ideal critic. Or, put it the other way, a great critic finds her ideal movie. 

Serpell approaches Zola obliquely. She starts not with the movie, but with various artistic conceptions of whoredom, including Emile Zola’s novel Nana and Édouard Manet’s Olympia. She quotes Marx: “Prostitution is only the specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer.” She’s not sure Marx is right. “Is the prostitute a canny producer or a rapacious consumer?” she asks. All of this is interesting. But, for me, it’s only when Serpell turns her attention to Zola that her piece really takes off. And, man, does it take off! She writes about the movie’s vivid gas station restroom scene:

The effect of Olympia’s maid lives on. Stefani, the white sex worker, is thin and blonde and all-American, but her voice and manner—she combs her baby hairs, twerks her ass, raps along to hip-hop—are infused with blackness. This is meant to reverse some stereotypes. At one point on the road trip, Stefani exaggeratedly mocks a black stripper for being “nasty” and “dirty,” when we’ve just seen Stefani herself being exactly that during a pit stop. In the gas station bathroom, the camera floats above the stalls (the chamber pot again), dividing the screen between Stefani’s stall (she sits; she doesn’t wipe; her urine is an unhealthy egg-yolk yellow) and Zola’s (she hovers; she asks for some toilet paper; her urine barely tinges the water). The white woman, not the black one, is the “dirty ho.”

Okay, Serpell, you’ve got my attention. Never before have I read a comparative analysis of urine in a movie review. But Zola calls for it. Pee color is relevant to its meaning. As Serpell points out, it shows that “The white woman, not the black one, is the ‘dirty ho.’ ”

The centerpiece of Zola – it’s climax, so to speak – is the extended scene at the second motel. Serpell describes it superbly:

Stefani changes into an innocent-schoolgirl outfit straight out of Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time” video. A bearded middle-aged white man arrives. As soon as Zola opens the door, he complains: “I ordered a white chick.” Zola rolls her eyes, negotiates the transaction, then turns away from the bed as her voiceover deadpans, “They start fucking, it was gross.” When the sex is over and Zola hears how little money he has paid, she’s aghast: “Pussy is worth thousands, bitch.” She takes a new picture of Stefani to advertise her services on BackPage, and raises the prices. Soon, as in Nana, the men are practically lined up at the door. For some reason (aren’t we in Florida?), they’re all white.

The film highlights the johns’ interchangeability in their turns with Stefani: they take off their clothes; they manipulate her body; they climax. These shots appear in horizontal rows so we see a sliding blazon of male chests, stomachs, crotches. We seem to be scrolling through them as if we’re on Tinder or Instagram, bestowing exploding heart emojis over pecs and dicks. The grotesquerie of the images is meant to interrupt what pleasure the scene might otherwise prompt. It’s, again, a reversal—men rather than women divided into parts, turned into a series.

My favorite part of Serpell’s review is her description of Zola’s style. She writes,

Its aesthetic, like other films produced by A24, has an air of gentrified graffiti, a palette like a neon bruise. But Bravo beautifully contains the sun-shot pastels of Florida in the manner of a David Hockney painting, and the film deftly references its origins on social media. With a camera-shutter sound, the screen freezes into a snapshot that shrinks into a corner, like on an iPhone; with a cha-ching of change, hearts flash or rise up the screen, like in an Instagram Live; with clickety-clicks and emoji bursts, texts are typed into being; the date and time appear at the top of the screen in a thin white font, then vanish—both with a click; and we occasionally hear the Twitter whistle, as the screenplay explains, “to pay homage when a line in the script is identical to one of @_zolarmoon’s tweets.”

That “palette like a neon bruise” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – every bit as artful and brilliant as the movie it describes. 

December 12, 2022 Issue

This week’s issue contains an excellent Richard Brody capsule review of Janicza Bravo’s brilliant Zola (2021). Brody refers to the movie’s “exquisite stylization.” For a detailed description of that stylization, check out Namwali Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” (The New York Review of Books, July 21, 2022). Serpell writes,

Zola is at its best when it lets this archetypal plot lie and plays with its filmic form instead. Its aesthetic, like other films produced by A24, has an air of gentrified graffiti, a palette like a neon bruise. But Bravo beautifully contains the sun-shot pastels of Florida in the manner of a David Hockney painting, and the film deftly references its origins on social media. With a camera-shutter sound, the screen freezes into a snapshot that shrinks into a corner, like on an iPhone; with a cha-ching of change, hearts flash or rise up the screen, like in an Instagram Live; with clickety-clicks and emoji bursts, texts are typed into being; the date and time appear at the top of the screen in a thin white font, then vanish—both with a click; and we occasionally hear the Twitter whistle, as the screenplay explains, “to pay homage when a line in the script is identical to one of @_zolarmoon’s tweets.”

That “palette like a neon bruise” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” is my choice for best critical essay of 2022.