L'art Le Plus Politique Nicole Brenez

29/05/2019 L’ART LE PLUS POLITIQUE NICOLE BRENEZ with Donal Foreman – The Brooklyn Rail
The Brookyn Rail has been invited to participate in the 2019 Venice Biennale 
Film April 2nd, 2012
INCONVERSATION
L’ART LE PLUS POLITIQUE

NICOLE BRENEZ with Donal Foreman
In an essay on Adorno’s relationship with cinema, Nicole Brenez proposes that “the fact that one can
think with certain films, and not simply about them, is the irrefutable sign of their value.” Few critics
have reached the same level of intensity as Brenez in thinking with cinema. Although her first book
was published in France in 1995 (a study of Cassavetes’s Shadows that has yet to be translated into
English), it was her contribution to the landmark book of cinephilic film criticism, Movie Mutations,
in 2004 that introduced her to many Anglophone readers. She shares with many of her peers in that
volume (such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, Fergus Daly, and Adrian Martin, who has translated much of
her writing into English) an eclectic and egalitarian approach to criticism both in terms of the cinema
she writes about (from Marcel Hanoun to Mission Impossible) and the range of stylistic and
theoretical tools she employs, freely mixing infectious passion and lyricism with rigorous conceptual
invention. This is a writer who, in her book-length study of Abel Ferrara, could place the director in a
lineage of negation that includes Hegel and Bataille while also opening with the irresistible line, “Abel
Ferrara is to cinema what Joe Strummer is to music: a poet who justifies the existence of popular
forms.”
But Brenez’s work is also distinguished by the forceful political consciousness that permeates it,
something which Internationalist Cinema for Today, the series of screenings she has curated for
Anthology Film Archives (March 2 – 11), makes abundantly clear. Both in her writing and her equally
prolific work as the Cinémathèque Française’s resident avant-garde programmer, Brenez has gone to
great efforts to revive, preserve, and construct a film history of resistance and formal invention,
explicitly opposed to the medium’s dominant, industry-centric narrative. This commitment is
exemplified in her essential and inexhaustible essay on the history of modern French cinema, “Forms
1960 – 2000,” in which she asserts, “the less familiar the names and titles mentioned in this essay
may appear, the more important they are in reality.” The 17 programs that make up the
internationalist series persuasively illustrate this principle, with much that will be unfamiliar for even
those well-versed in radical cinema; several titles, including all of the René Vautier films presented,
have been subtitled in English specially for the series.
In one of her introductions at Anthology this weekend, Brenez emphasized her intent to convey the
richness and diversity of this cinema more than trace any particular line or trajectory in its
development. The resulting proliferation of times, places, and styles is perfectly in keeping with the
mission she ascribes to internationalism: “to resist all processes of identification imposed by
geography, history, and bureaucracy rather than existential singular free choice.” And it’s indicative of
the enthusiasm and generosity that energizes all of Brenez’s work: a love for these films that are not as
seen, as appreciated, or as “thought with” as they should be, and a desire to share them. This is
coupled with a corresponding humility: The selection for Anthology is unabashedly incomplete, and
Brenez is always, as she once put it, “prey to the intuition that she still knows nothing of all that
remains to be done in this field, and aware that it will require a vigilant, collective, and infinite effort.”
https://brooklynrail.org/2012/04/ﬁlm/lart-le-plus-politiquenicole-brenez-with-donal-foreman 1/10
This interview was first published online on March 6, 2012.
Donal Foreman (Rail): Why do you consider “internationalism” an important concept for cinema

today? And how do you see your selection of films for the Anthology series in relation to the problems
of internationalism raised in Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Here and Elsewhere (Ici et
ailleurs, 1976), speaking about working in Palestine: “If we wanted to make the revolution for them,
it’s perhaps because at that time we didn’t really want to make it where we are”?
Nicole Brenez: My basis for identifying an internationalist current in contemporary cinema is

grounded in several determinations. First of all, the fact of having researched, for many years now,
the history of politically engaged cinema, which often laid claim to internationalist movements: in
1930s Spain, in colonial Africa since the ’50s and in the Tricontinental countries during the ’60s and
’70s. The important historical figures in this scenario are essentially communists or communist
sympathizers such as Joris Ivens or René Vautier, but also anarchists such as Armand Guerra or
Armand Gatti. Next, the fact that the works of internationalist filmmakers, especially those without
allegiance to any party or movement, are the most fragile and vulnerable to being forgotten. I’m
thinking here of the still-mysterious figure of Edouard de Laurot, of Yolande du Luart, Tobias Engel,
Jean-Michel Humeau. Some important works have in fact disappeared, although I’m optimistic that
they’ve actually just been archived either too poorly or too well: I’m thinking in particular of Nossa
Terra by Mario Marret, of which no copies exist in France but which I’m sure is sleeping somewhere
in New York, no doubt in the archives of Third World Newsreel. All of these internationalist initiatives
deserve to be passed on to contemporary protest movements: Their freedom and courage resonate
with current initiatives, and these filmmakers are often the ancestors of those who fight through
images today. Lastly, their example and their ideals allow us to fight the current reign of nationalist or
even communitarian ideologies.
Here and Elsewhere is a very important film in this context, as are all the films of the Dziga Vertov
Group for that matter, and the work of Godard in general. To me, the “failure” of their initial project,
Until Victory (Jusqu’à la victoire), which was filmed in Palestine, resulted not only in a very beautiful
film, but above all, in an ideological (theoretical) success; because if Until Victory does “fail” in the
sense that it could not be completed and becomes Here and Elsewhere instead, it’s because, among
other things, the filmmakers refused to obey the dictates of the political organizations with whom
they had decided to work. As René Vautier puts it very well in his memoirs, Citizen Camera (Caméra
Citoyenne), he had had the same experience with Frantz Fanon, 12 years earlier during the Algerian
Revolution, with the film Algeria in Flames (Algérie en flammes). While filming the Algerian
resistance, Vautier refused to subordinate his work to the political apparatus of the FLN at his friend
Frantz Fanon’s request. Here’s how he formulates the necessity for a filmmaker to remain
independent, even with respect to his own allies:
An Algerian in a position of authority speaks: Since you don’t agree with
Fanon’s ideas, we’ll try to find another solution that works both for you and
for us. What bothers you the most in Fanon’s proposal is the idea of going
on the FLN payroll and depending entirely on us?” “Basically, yes.”— “Petit
bourgeois sensitivity? You don’t have a problem taking a bullet, but you
want it to be known that you’ll die for ideas and not for big bucks?” He has a
mischievous little glimmer in his eyes. I think it over: “That’s part of it,
maybe, but there’s also the fact that I intend to participate to the fullest
extent in creating meaning in the images I film ... in the editing, in the
narration.…”—“That means that you alone will be responsible for what will be
said about your images?”— “Not necessarily. I refuse to use images to
illustrate a pattern or a preestablished thesis, because I think that can only
result in a bad film. I film what I see, what hits me” (I didn’t realize how
right I would turn out to be: I ended up filming the parachute sniper and the
bullet that shot my camera a few months later!) “And afterwards I’m ready
to discuss my interpretation of these images, above all with others who have
very different information than I do about their social and political context”.
René Vautier, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Pierre Gorin and their camera operator Armand Marco
had the same experience and came to the same conclusion, mutadis mutandis: Though they were
anxious to put themselves at the service of the struggle of people who had been colonized by their own
nation, they refused nevertheless to let their images be controlled or dictated to them. (This is how
Jean-Luc Godard’s manifesto, published in El Fatah in July 1970, begins: “We thought it would be
more appropriate politically for us to come to Palestine rather than to go elsewhere, like to
Mozambique, Colombia, or Bengal, because the Middle East was directly colonized by British and
French imperialism [Sykes-Picot Agreement]. We are French militants.”) No matter how politically
responsible and committed they are, one thing is of paramount importance: their expertise with
images, the fact that images engender discussion and even create a conversation amongst themselves,
rather than merely being the passive or even servile instrument of discourse. “Art is a dissident force,”
wrote Herbert Marcuse—cases like this are a good example.
In addition they were all romantics, of course, but after the beautiful example of Friedrich Schiller, or
Byron going to Missolonghi to fight for Greek independence: They were “the last/supreme
romantics,” “ultimate romantics” as Peter Whitehead very aptly says about Godard. Their ideals of
emancipation are indissociable from German Romanticism, and first among the direct heirs of the
Athenaeum was the young Karl Marx; his later corrections and self-criticism notwithstanding, he was
formed by the ideals of the original German Romanticism.
Rail: For this year’s Sight and Sound end of year poll, you listed Occupy Wall Street’s livestream feed
as one of your cinematic highlights of the year. Do you have any reservations about this new
proliferation of online political imagery? My concern is that most of what is produced is limited to
forms that are journalistic or even pseudo-commercial—there seems to be a predominance of what
Serge Daney called the Visual as opposed to the Image.
Brenez: On the contrary, the proliferation of images seems to me to be a wonderful phenomenon:

more images and films in line with standardized forms, of course, but also more formal, visual, and
logistical innovations. There is a sea of inventive and valuable proposals that we will need to start
exploring. To put it succinctly, four important kinds of initiatives can be located on the Internet:
images of counter-information, which are direct descendants of the Newsreels, the Cinegiornali, the
Ciné-Tracts of the 1960s, the Revolutionary News (Actualités révolutionnaires) of Raymundo
Gleyzer’s Ciné de la Base, or Sandinista filmmakers (who are represented in the Anthology program
by three very different films whose material nonetheless all comes from footage shot on the
frontlines: Mauro Andrizzi’s Iraqi Short Films, This Place is Iran [Cet endroit c’est l’Iran], and
Anders Oestergaard’s Burma VJ); essays and critical overviews, some of them brilliant, heirs to the
writing of Chris Marker, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, the Cinéthique groups, and Armand
Mattelart; the immemorial and indispensable tradition of revolutionary songs and videos that often
represent the most poetic and enthusiastic popular expression; and the development of hapax, of
completely unique forms following the example of the films of Laura Waddington, Marylène Negro, or
Florent Marcie’s Saïa, in Anthology’s program. This fourth aspect remains largely unexplored, and it
would require a collective effort to identify, comment on, and conserve the memory of these films. To
give but one example that establishes a direct link between the formal innovations of the ’60s (that
drew much from sources such as Santiago Alvarez and Fernando Solanas) and contemporary ones:
December Seeds, inspired by the Greek crisis, links Chris Marker’s style to the visual forms of popular
expression on the web. (The film can be found on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/34246811).
Because the film dates from 2009, we can’t exclude the possibility that its hybrid and musical
stylistics directly inspired Jean-Luc Godard’s very beautiful movie Film Socialisme. Both emerge
from a “republic of images,” in other words from forms of montage that de-hierarchize formats,
techniques, textures, and qualities, to the benefit of a more far-reaching, more political perspective
and at the expense of technophilic and economic criteria. For me, they constitute pieces of a symbolic
utopia.
Rail: How do you see the relationship between your writing and your work as a programmer and
teacher?
Brenez: Often I ask myself what my life would have been like if, in 1995, Dominique Païni had not
proposed that I take charge of the experimental programs at the Cinémathèque Française. Because for
me, to do justice to such an assignment meant actively contributing to the exploration of those parts
of cinema history that remain hidden, to the defense of the most radical or the most fragile
movements and to the critique of prejudices and clichés, through concrete action. At the time a
schism prevailed that was fratricidal in my opinion, between experimental cinema (supposedly
implying “the pursuit of formal beauty”) and political cinema (supposedly implying “fieldwork devoid
of aesthetic ambition”). A large part of my work will have been to exhume and to highlight films that
are as formally demanding as they are politically, a combination which should be self-evident since
critiquing the world order entails critiquing the discursive order. So I showed forgotten works of
Edouard de Laurot, the Medvedkin Group, Jean Vigo’s group, René Vautier, Yann Le Masson, Bruno
Muel, Carole Roussopoulos, Yolande du Luart—and above all I’m happy to have done it while most of
them were still alive, because since then several among them have left us. I don’t know what I can do
that would be more useful, in my view, than to indicate to them, through my writing and through my
programming choices, that their work is not only essential but much more important for the history
of cinema than many of the over-exposed films that exist only as symptoms, whereas their films
represent crucial actions, on aesthetic as well as political planes. Although, to be clear, the distinction
between the aesthetic and political has no meaning other than an ideological and falsifying one. That’s
why it was important for me to show, for example, Bruce Conner’s Crossroads andCinéthique’s An
Entire Program (Tout un programme) in a single screening: both masterful films, both grappling
with the military-nuclear industry, and each positioned at different extremes of a formal spectrum.
One, Crossroads, based entirely on visuality and hypnotic effects, and the other, An Entire Program,
based entirely on speech, demonstrability, and rationality. But Crossroads also creates a space for
rational commentary (on the delirium of the American army that puts cameras in atomic mushroom
clouds) and, symmetrically, An Entire Program produces delirious poetic effects with its Engelsian
demonstration of the fascist nature of atomic fission.
So films that attack simultaneously on both formal and social fronts are much more numerous than
we think. This tradition has its heralds: Dziga Vertov, Omar Amiralay, Tawfiq Saleh, Lionel Soukaz,
Anand Patwardhan, Lav Diaz, Mounir Fatmi, Akram Zaatari, Amar Kanwar whose work was
introduced to me by John Gianvito, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar’s Otolith Group, Waguih Abdel
Messeeh. For 17 years I have been looking, and I continue today to look for, discover, and program
these kinds of works, past and present, and the corpus is inexhaustible, which makes me joyful and
optimistic. This incessant research nourishes my work as a programmer, as a teacher, and as a writer
simultaneously, and all my work is founded in the observation that the history of cinema is as unfair
as the general history of humanity when it comes to recognizing its real heroes.
Rail: As a programmer and a teacher you work within, or at least in negotiation with, major
institutions such as the Cinémathèque and Paris III University. I gather your political sympathies are
very much on the anti-state/anarchist end of the spectrum, so I wonder if you view these institutional
relationships as a compromise or struggle in some way, albeit a necessary one?
Brenez: The French university remains, even under our current government, a locus of critical
freedom. There will be an attempt, like everywhere else, to subjugate and asphyxiate this freedom, not
through laws but through administrative and economic constraints, which are far more efficient—
similarly to the economic censorship of films, which is infinitely more powerful than political
censorship. But for the time being the content of courses and seminars is still left entirely up to the
judgment of the instructors. On the other hand, I note that Isabelle Marinone, one of my most
brilliant and serious doctoral students, whose dissertation was dedicated to the history of the
relationship between cinema and anarchy in France (she published a part of it in Portuguese thanks
to the Cinémathèque of Brazil), can’t get a job. All signs indicate that her subject scares people,
despite the fact that she has revealed an entire facet of film creation in France, and drawn attention to
the fascinating efforts of technicians, screenwriters, directors, actors, critics, from Musidora to
Maurice Lemaître. It is as if she were suspected of actually trying to propagate anarchy. There is no
recognition of either the scientific rigor of her work or of what anarchy, in all of its diverse
dimensions, really is: that is, its faith in the capacity of individuals to discipline themselves and to
sacrifice themselves for the collective good.
As for the Cinémathèque Française, it was founded by anarchists, Henri Langlois and Georges Franju:
I am but their humble, distant grandchild and every Friday when I arrive there, I ask myself if they
would be happy with the screening that is scheduled. And often, leaving, I feel sure that yes, they
would be, thanks to the films, to the filmmakers who are present, and to the audience, who are at
times as brilliant as the directors.
Rail: In your writing, you’ve celebrated both independent, guerrilla filmmaking (of the kind that the
internationalist series primarily consists of) as well as filmmakers such as Abel Ferrara who engage in
the murkier world of commercial financing and Hollywood, and then even more “embedded”
directors such as Paul Verhoeven and Brian De Palma. How do you assess the institutional
negotiations or compromises that these filmmakers face?
Brenez: Guerrilla initiatives come from everywhere: from underground, but also from the heart of
the fortress, which is called sabotage. When Paul Verhoeven makes Starship Troopers, a super-
production based on all the necessary ingredients (actors, screenplay, iconography, props,
marketing), in which he represents American imperialism as Nazism, he redirects the apparatus of
production itself, and that is a monumental effort, much more complicated than making a radical film
in your home. It is a major event, and disruptive, to have both critical and popular success for a film;
it’s like the realization of all cinematic ideals at once. Directors like John Carpenter, George Romero,
Brian De Palma, pick up on the great tradition of Hollywood critique sustained for example by Tod
Browning or Douglas Sirk. To me, one of the most interesting trajectories in the history of cinema is
that of Haskell Wexler, who participated in politically committed films with Emile de Antonio and
Jane Fonda, directed Medium Cool, a self-critical essay about the role of the filmmaker, and then, as a
cinematographer, illuminated the visual experiments of Norman Jewison and Michael Cimino. We
owe one of the most revolutionary sentences ever spoken to Lacan: “to deduct nothing from one’s
desire.” Or, in Adorno’s terms, to refuse mutilation.
Rail: It seems to me that many of the great political filmmakers of the ’60s and ’70s developed an
attitude of resignation in later years, with even those that continue to make films removing
themselves from surrounding political engagements. I’m thinking of filmmakers like Godard, Robert
Kramer, or Jon Jost, who once wrote his work was a “total failure” in socio-political terms, “and
perhaps an inherent, necessary, and required failure, having to do with how society is structured and
how it speaks to itself.”What do you make of such an assessment?
Brenez: In 2002 I had invited René Vautier to do a master class at Paris I. I thought that, confronted
with a room full of young students and filmmakers, he would infuse them with courage, through the
tremendous example of his own historical relevance, tenacity, and ingenuity. But to my great surprise,
he began his talk by saying, very gently and pleasantly, that what being a politically committed
filmmaker meant concretely was to not know how to pay the bills, to not leave an inheritance to one’s
children, and to risk seeing all of one’s work destroyed. He had come with a 16mm reel and we
projected it in the classroom thanks to the members of ETNA, the Experimental Lab Group, Othello
Vilgard, Hugo Verlinde, and Yves-Marie Mahé: It was the untitled film where we see him walking
among his archives hacked to pieces and covered in oil by an “unidentified” commando, after he
participated in the trial against then would-be presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, because he
had filmed a number of Algerians that Le Pen had personally tortured. The reel, filmed by Yann Le
Masson, was rose-tinted, silent, intensely emotional: A man walks among the debris of his work, he
identifies a poster, a little bit of film. In this disturbing reel, we can read an allegory for the history of
politically committed cinema: a field of ruins, both personal and collective.
This seems to me to go in the direction of Jon Jost. Except that René Vautier did not stop filming,
even after this destruction, and that Jon Jost currently participates in the film collective Far From
Afghanistan, with John Gianvito, Travis Wilkerson, and others. They always knew that something
much more important than success existed—not in terms of commercial success of course, which is
not even a concern but on the contrary is more often a model to flee, but in terms of victory in
struggle or of success in the capacity to convince. The most important thing is to respond to a
historical situation, to stand up against injustice and oppression—certain filmmakers will always
remain lying down and others will always stand up, regardless of their fatigue, their health, or their
spirit. René Vautier directed a very pretty fiction film about these “lying down” filmmakers who, when
confronted with a concrete injustice (in this particular case an Algerian who was beaten up by police)
will invent for themselves every reason in the world to do nothing. The film is called Remorse (Le
Remords), and it mocks, with a lot of humor, all the French filmmakers who didn’t budge during the
Algerian War, in particular the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague. Jon Jost, René, Guillermo Escalon,
Frank Pineda, Jocelyne Saab, Arthur MacCaig, Bruno Muel, Margaret Dickinson, and many others are
filmmakers who will stand up no matter what. The “until victory” attitude, typical of the 1970s, of
Godard, Gorin, or Masao Adachi, does not aim for success, but is a mantra for self-protection when
power struggles are not playing out to one’s own advantage.
Rail: There is an acute sensitivity in your writing to the catastrophic nature of our current society,
what you call in your book on Ferrara the “inverted world of injustice and mutilated existence.” And
yet, even when you are dealing with someone like Ferrara, who you describe as “entirely devoted to a
description of the negative without the slightest utopian or messianic appeal,” you never seem to
despair, partly it seems because of the very fact that these films exist. I’m reminded of the wonderful
passages in Deleuze’s Cinema 2 where he talks about cinema’s capacity to produce a belief in the
world, something which seems like a cornerstone for you as well; you have written that cinema
verifies “that something else is still possible (a body, a friend, a world).” I’m wondering about the
danger of this belief becoming a kind of pacifier, something that makes life in its current state more
bearable—like the Newsreel collective said of the New York Film Festival, “a sop, designed to funnel
off the dissatisfactions of an alienated intellectual elite[...]in much the same way that anti-poverty
programs are designed to pacify the disaffected poor”—as opposed to something which contributes to
and energizes further resistance and experimentation.
Brenez: Yes, the question of the effectiveness of cinema is a crucial one. There are many answers to
this question. First there is Jean-Marie Straub’s beautiful and simple answer, in response to Simon
Hartog in 1970, who asked Straub if he thought that cinema can have a political role:
Of course it has a political role. Everything is political, everything that you do
in your life is political. Thus cinema, the art form that maintains the most
direct relationship with life, is the most political art form. This doesn’t mean
that socalled “agitprop” films are the most political ones—often the opposite
is true. But cinema is the political art form par excellence.
Then we can distinguish between different temporalities: In its symbolic function, cinema produces
immaterial effects, which are therefore difficult to establish. But like all work, it produces effects in
the short, medium, and long terms, effects which often prove to correspond to one another but are
sometimes also totally opposed.
A beautiful example of the short-term effects of directly witnessing images is found in Anne-Laure de
Franssu’s Sou Hami, The Fear of Night (Sou Hami, La crainte de la nuit). Sou Hami comprises a
fascinating experiment because it consists of following film activist Mory Coulibaly in Africa as he
projects Look Dear Parents (Regardez chers parents). Look Dear Parents was filmed in 2006, at the
heart of the struggle of the “Cachan Thousand” during which thousands of people were caught in the
pitiless traps of the French government’s anti-migration politics. People evicted manu militari from
Building F of the Cité Universitaire de Cachan and thrown into the street, many of them homeless,
often also undocumented, had regrouped in the Cachan gymnasium. Several filmmakers followed this
battle, including Mory Coulibaly, delegate of the evicted families and activist in the struggle. Mory
filmed what happened, with help from Anne-Laure de Franssu and her organization, II mots en
images. Then Anne-Laure de Franssu followed Mory Coulibaly during his trip to Mali, on a tour from
town to village where he screened Look Dear Parents to spectators stupefied by the violence of the
police state, and whose remarks, often less distressed for themselves than for the state of
contemporary France, constitute one of the most powerful critiques to this day of the government’s
politics. This amazing experience allows us to observe concretely what cinema can do in a specific
situation.
In the long term, the effects of politically committed cinema resound infinitely and can emerge
completely unexpectedly. One recent case is that of René Vautier’s A Man is Dead (Un homme est
mort), a film of social intervention during a strike in Brest in 1951, during which police shot and killed
a worker, Edouard Mazé. René Vautier recounted the story in his memoirs of how the 16mm
reversible film was destroyed as a result of being projected. Many interventionist films are likewise
destined to disappear in the heat of action, like combatants on the front. But since then, during the
course of the 2000s, this lost film has continued to generate texts, thoughts, events, concerts, and a
comic strip of the same name, A Man is Dead, by Kris and Etienne Davodeau. These disappeared
images, because they have disappeared, infuse a whole new generation with inspiration and energy.
They have become more alive than all of the “successful” films shot that same year.
A politically committed filmmaker is first of all someone who thinks of collective history, thus
someone who thinks in terms of the future that he wishes to call forth, and who sows the seeds of
justice in the form of images knowing that, at best, they will grow later. Let’s call them the “December
seeds” to pick up on the Greek Markerian’s title.
CONTRIBUTOR
Donal Foreman, answers translated from the French by Youna Kwak
DONAL FOREMAN is an Irish filmmaker, critic, and programmer living in Brooklyn.

YOUNA KWAK is a poet and translator who lives in Brookyn, NY.
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29/05/2019 L’ART LE PLUS POLITIQUE NICOLE BRENEZ with Donal Foreman – The Brooklyn Rail

L’ART LE PLUS POLITIQUE

This interview was first published online on March 6, 2012.

Donal Foreman (Rail): Why do you consider “internationalism” an important concept for cinema

Nicole Brenez: My basis for identifying an internationalist current in contemporary cinema is

Brenez: On the contrary, the proliferation of images seems to me to be a wonderful phenomenon:

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2018: The

DONAL FOREMAN with Leo Goldsmith

An Excerpt from Slow Writing: Thom

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