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A. S. Hamrah

A. S. Hamrah’s work has appeared in a number of publications, including n+1, Bookforum, and Harper’s. A collection of his work, The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018 (n+1 Books), was called “essential reading” by The Nation and “form-bending, disobedient” by New York magazine.

A red, white and black illustration of different characters from the films being reviewed in this piece set against a psychedelic background.

Zero Hour Contracts

Cinema does not currently exist, or if it does exist, it’s in the form of videos from the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, shot on smartphones and put on Twitter, which viewers can watch from anywhere. These videos, hundreds of them from all over the ...

Charity Believeth All Things

February 3, 2020
Last month, Semiotext(e) reissued Gary Indiana’s Depraved Indifference, originally published in 2001. Here is A.S. Hamrah’s introduction to the novel. We live in a time of exceptional, unprecedented grift, so much so that our era is turning the history of the United ...

Flu in the Face

February 4, 2016
Anyone who spends time in enclosed public spaces is barraged with images from television news, most often broadcast from the default network, CNN. We glimpse these images, with the sound down, for only seconds at a time as they bounce, germ-like, from corner to corner, chasing ...

Now Streaming: The Plague Years

When things are very American, they are as American as apple pie. Except violence. H. Rap Brown said violence “is as American as cherry pie,” not apple pie. Brown’s maxim makes us see violence as red and gelatinous, spooned from a can. But for Brown, in 1967, American ...

Freedom of Choice Degree Zero

May 26, 2015
Soon there will only be two kinds of ads on broadcast TV: commercials for things that make you sick and commercials for things that cure the illnesses caused by the things that make you sick. That’s why fast-food ads are stocked with images of youth living it up, while Big ...