"I’m a latecomer to Sharon Van Etten. I only heard this towards the end of last year and it melted me. It’s actually my girlfriend and I’s song. “The song is about Etten bidding farewell to New York, where she was living in her 20’s. When she was leaving the city, she wanted to write a song that was a farewell to the landscape of her 20’s, which became “Seventeen.” In the journey of writing the song she visited these places where she danced or met people and where she’d had these formative experiences of her young life. One of these places was a club that’s now an Italian restaurant. “It’s a song about gentrification, about how a city has different lives, and that feels so true to me and it really resonates. On my walk to the pool that I swim at in London, I walk past this derelict building which used to be a club I danced in when I was 17 and coming up to London. “Now it’s empty and filled with squatters and whenever I walk past it, I feel this pang of something that I can’t describe, but that “Seventeen” managed to encapsulate. That feeling is like, ‘All these memories took place in that building and only the people who were there can tell those stories. Anyone else who walks by just sees an empty building, or an Italian restaurant.’ “I think “Seventeen” is really about that. How street corners and physical spaces can have very powerful human memories and experiences hidden in the brick and mortar. So, for me it’s a song that encapsulates a feeling of loss - the loss of innocence perhaps."

"Italian, a black-and-white movie. If you go to the internet, you can find it. Dino Risi movie, with Vittorio Gassman acting in it. And a French actor named Jean-Louis Trintignant. It is about somebody who is pretentious, who’s always speaking [loudly], always speaking about himself. And somebody in front who is shy. The story is about changing personality, and the moral of the story is, “If you want to change your personality, change with your own rhythm. Don’t try to imitate people.” [This was] reality because so many people try to imitate things that they have seen without any reasons inside themselves. They just want to imitate because they have seen that on screen or in a book. Instead of following their own rhythm, their own needs. I still remember that… long time ago. 30 years ago."

"Antonioni’s great L’avventura, La notte, and L’eclisse are yet another linked trilogy, though their stories and characters are as disparate as those of the Rossellini trilogy. It may be the director’s hyper-refined architectural style that we remember most in this film, people lost in its urban landscape. But Antonioni was also very much a child of Italian neorealism, as we can trace in his early films and documentaries. The long, wordless sequence, devoid of the main characters, that concludes this film is justly cited as a masterpiece of visual alienation and loss. But the hectic frenzy of the Turin Bourse sequence, a near standalone set piece in the middle of the film, shows the director at his documentary best, even as the camera smoothly glides through the rushing masses of stock traders with a singular determination of its own mission"