Linda Dunn

After the author’s period of experimentation, these American notes are extremely straightforward. As in Migration, however, this America could be a more remote country, and the inspiration is avowedly Japanese (Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North). Implicitly, the film-maker compares himself to an old peddler of drawings, Sam, hawking his wares at the entrance of Columbia’s Butler Library.

Shot between Italy and New York City, Warming Up is the journal of a season of creativity. The film-maker and his characters improvise scenes and sequences, and wonder how to make up a story as they go along. The recurring theme is how to make the world (or read it as) an imaginative place...