Summary: Provisional Insight Colloquium: Lesley Stern <strong>“Tenuous Intrigues”: Killing Sheep and Killing Time</strong> Kracauer talks of the “tenuous intrigues” that characterize certain films, films that navigate between the genres of story and non-story, or experimental films and films of fact. He identifies a “conflict between intrigue and poetry” manifested “in the nature of real-life episodes.” In this paper I explore Kracauer’s “tenuous intrigues” in two pairs of films by two film-makers: Charles Burnett’s <em>Killer of Sheep</em> and <em>Warming by the Devil’s Fire</em>, and Agnes Vardas’ <em>Cleo from 5 to 7</em> and <em>Vagabond</em>. Lesley Stern is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of <em>The Scorsese Connection</em> and <em>The Smoking Book</em> and co-editor of <em>Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance</em>. She has published widely in areas of film, performance, photography, art and cultural studies and also writes fiction. She is currently writing a book called <em>Gardening in a Strange Land.</em>
