MEDIA DIET
By:
May 5, 2026
Matthew has been a valued HILOBROW contributor since 2009; in fact, he was the founding coeditor of the site. His first post was on the topic of SETI INSTITUTE SCIENCE RADIO. His most recent contributions to this publication include: THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST | THE INTEGRAL TREES | PENGUIN.
HILOBROW: What’s the best movie you’ve seen recently?
MATTHEW BATTLES: La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the 1928 silent directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti, with Antonin Artaud mooning about in a fascinating cameo. One of those films I’ve known without knowing for a long time. I recently watched it on television in the streaming Criterion edition with a score by Richard Einhorn (it’s also been scored by Portishead’s Adrian Utley, among others). My god, it had me on the edge of my seat (well, my couch) — I felt ambushed and astonished to have stumbled into such a gripping, hallucinatory experience with clicker in hand. With its expressionist sets and abstract, sketchy mise-en-scène, it has the thespian economy of so much early film. And yet it might be the most purely cinematic thing I’ve ever seen. It’s the faces — especially Falconetti’s, which reads like a vast landscape, a whole planet orbiting the divine, her passions playing across its surfaces like some great and terrible weather. I can only imagine it overwhelming me in cinema.
HILOBROW: What music — genres, particular artists and songs — do you listen to during a typical day?
MATTHEW BATTLES: I’ll answer this one in the frame of recency because I’m always in a churn. Top of list of late has been Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rogers and Hart Song Book. Richard Linklater’s new film Blue Moon is a drunken stumble through the uncanny valley, but it got me wondering: out of whose unblemished brow does the American songbook — the whole vaudeville, Broadway, Tin-Pan-Alley hullabaloo — arise seemingly fully formed? There’s a great book by Alec Wilder, American Popular Song, that traces the musicology of this material in scholarly detail. But Ella just says hold my highball and takes us away.
I’ve also been listening to these amazing, underappreciated female singer-songwriters from the seventies, women like Bobbie Gentry, Judee Sill, The Roches, Elyse Weinberg, and Linda Perhacs. As artists, they’re quite varied— Bobbie Gentry is Flannery O’Connor as a Nashville songwriter; Judee Sill’s voice is reedy and radically self-possessed; Linda Perhacs’s experiments with looping vocals sound like dreamtime vision quests out of the PNW — but they all were misunderstood and undervalued in their time, held forth moonshot-level musical visions, and had to fight for every inch of tape.
HILOBROW: What’s the best TV series you’ve seen recently?
MATTHEW BATTLES: I fell hard for the 2023 animated series Scavengers Reign. I want to call it a space chamber opera: although its vision is interplanetary, it’s set at intimate scales and scored in minor keys. With a visual idiom reminiscent of the work of French bandes-dessinateur Mœbius (Jean Giraud), it richly imagines an alien biosphere of abundance and metamorphosis, where humans are the radically alien other who, if they don’t learn to live in tune with the ways of the place, might find themselves turned into a skeletal home for vegetal homunculi or a transplant heart for a great dreaming beast. Like Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach novels adapted for film by Terence Malick, it suggests a cozy posthumanism, where humans and their problems — the stuff of story — gradually cede place to wild robots and vision-laden vines. Through it all there wafts this subtle ecological sublime, a grandeur in this view of alien life.