tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65773808296832283202024-03-18T06:10:00.855-07:00doe-eyed criticmaldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.comBlogger1166125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-91376719460639073742024-03-17T12:12:00.000-07:002024-03-17T12:12:19.959-07:00voyager (nona fernández tr. natasha wimmer)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Another Chilean tome which mines the alignment of the Atacama and the stargazers with the dark history of the dictatorship. In this case Fernandez participates in an Amnesty project to rename distant stars after a group of activists who were disappeared by the Pinochet regime. In the book, she mediates on the arbitrary nature of star signs; the process of growing up under the influence of the dictatorship; her mother’s sickness; how we might want the world to be perceived by extra terrestrials. Particularly fascinating is the way the writer investigates the notion that our genetic make up is connected to the very foundation of the universe itself, something successive generations of creatures, leading to humans, all share, once again reminding ourselves of what a mess we have made of this planet, where every individual has so much in common with every other individual, neighbours all of us within our tiny barrio in the giant megalopolis which is the universe. In spite of which man’s cruelty towards fellow man continues to flourish.</span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-89115296364517100822024-03-14T07:32:00.000-07:002024-03-14T07:32:37.942-07:00blood meridian (cormac mccarthy)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Cormac was a rite of passage for a certain class of artistically orientated male Londoner back in the nineties. Perhaps because all his novels seem to be constructed around the notion of young men enduring their rites of passage. Perhaps because the apparent harsh reality of McCarthy’s world was such a counterpoint to our urban existence. Secretly we all longed to be riding a horse across the frontier, the horse being our best friend, in order to confront the innumerable demons that growing up threw at us. Blood Meridian contains the coming of age thread, even if it is less pronounced than in later works. The kid who becomes part of Glanton’s scalping band, and obtains an existential nemesis in The Judge, is blood brother to the young men in The Crossing and All The Pretty Horses. There is something brittle about McCarthy’s neo-biblical prose, as though you could pick it up and snap it and feed it to desert fire. Is it truly as powerful as it would like to be, or is there a cod-potency, which is achieved by whacking the reader over the head with relentless descriptions of suns rising and moons waxing, mountains on the horizon, violence forever around the corner? The books cry out for a female or feminist reading to counterbalance all their raging testosterone, with women barely featuring in the gothic western. As a man, you find yourself thinking, it’s pushing all these buttons, but what would I think if I was a woman reading this? Perhaps there’s something elemental at work here, a subversive analysis of gender - or perhaps not. The strange thing about violence is that it becomes oddly repetitive and its power seems to diminish as a result; power tires of itself, and in the end the kid, one can’t help thinking, will be happy to be put out of his misery, to escape the nihilist world he has been condemned to ride through.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-36920659943381486522024-03-12T05:19:00.000-07:002024-03-18T06:09:27.856-07:00the limey (d soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">The Limey includes footage of its star, Terrence Stamp, from another film, Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, to show Stamp as a young man (and handsome devil). Soderbergh cleverly weaves this footage into his film, part of a masterful edit, lending The Limey an instant nostalgia factor. This nostalgia factor is amplified watching the film 25 years after its release. The Limey seems to hark back to a different, bolder era, when filmmakers were permitted a certain licence to indulge and hence enrich what might otherwise have been fairly regulation genre fare. In The Limey, alongside Out of Sight, Soderbergh constructed a pair of whip-smart films which perhaps would struggle to be financed today. Reminiscent of French thrillers like </span><a href="https://doeeyedcritic.blogspot.com/2021/12/le-cercle-rouge-w-jean-pierre-melville.html" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Cercle Rouge</a><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> or Le Samurai, The Limey makes a virtue of its difficulties: the choppy edit, a la Godard, the playfulness of the dialogue, Stamp’s weirdly monochromatic acting, only broken every now and again by a sly smile behind the eyes. It’s a minor direction masterclass. If this is where film is headed, we thought back in those last of the pre-millennial days, we’re in good hands.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p><div><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></div>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-41307729672045222462024-03-10T10:55:00.000-07:002024-03-10T10:55:22.069-07:00schizopolis (w&d soderbergh)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Doing a spot of research whilst trying to make my mind up whether to head to Cinemateca to catch another in the Soderbergh season, I read several people saying Schizopolis is the worst film ever made. Which meant that I really didn't have much choice: I had to go and see it. Schizopolis is not the worst film ever made, I am disappointed to have to say. It's not the best, but it's also far from the worst. It is quietly and pleasantly bonkers, as one might expect from a film where the director plays three characters, all variations on the same person, who is probably himself. What is admirable about Soderbergh is the way he games the system, making big studio films alongside his own smaller scale projects. There’s something quasi Godardian about all this., not least in the sense that he clearly doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of a film like Schizopolis, which was never going to be a box office hit and which many people will deem a self-indulgent mess. Which it sort of is, but sort of isn’t, as Soderbergh plays with humour and confusion to construct a narrative of multiple identities which almost works. On another level, it’s a slice of unadorned American life, shot without any trimmings, revealing the petty neuroses of the most powerful citizens on earth.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-38474024149593578992024-03-08T09:01:00.000-08:002024-03-08T09:01:05.192-08:00kafka (d. soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">I have memories of Soderbergh’s second feature coming out and being an unmitigated disaster, both critically and at the box office. The zietgesity wunderkind of SL&V coming back down to earth with a bump. Perhaps this is a false memory, but in the Soderbergh canon, you don’t offer hear people referring to Kafka. Of course it always helps a film to go in with low expectations, but Kafka, for all its predictability, still succeeded in charming. Perhaps it was the sight of Guinness and the youthful Irons helming a familiar looking cast, featuring one of those zany double acts with Keith Allen and Simon McBurney, the type of humorous conceit which never normally works, but in this case seems to. Perhaps it was the sight of Prague in all its pre-touristy glory. Or perhaps it was just the evident glee of a young director getting to fulfil his dream of making a passion project, all homage to expressionism, Fritz Lang, and so on.</span></p><p><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Later in the Cinemateca cafe, Victor appeared. He had a garish orange painting. On closer inspection it showed McDowell from A Clockwork Orange. In that film’s expressionist glory, there lurks perhaps another homage to Lang’s violence. It was too auspicious to pass up, and so I bought the picture for Sñr Amato, who had also chanced to come to the screening of a blousy Sunday evening. Hopefully the picture will find a home on the bright shore of the Maldonado coast, a far cry from the foggy dunes of Prague. </i></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-27362978448318575882024-03-04T10:37:00.000-08:002024-03-04T10:37:23.600-08:00aliss at the fire (jon fosse, tr. damion searls)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">When Fosse won the Nobel prize last year, a few people got in touch. Being the one of the few English directors to have worked on a Fosse play, there was a kind of perceived reflected glory. When I directed Winter I had a brief email exchange with Fosse, my second correspondence with a Nobel prize winner. He was warm and open. Which is pretty much the oposite of his work, which is closed and cold, or if not cold, like a figure in a big coat huddled over a fire which isn’t giving off much warmth. Aliss at the Fire is the first of his novels I have read, albeit the tone is very similar to his plays. An intense and mysterious examination of human interactions, interactions which span the generations. Fosse comes from a world where the dead grandparents walk side by side with their living heirs. It’s a worldview which ties into one held by so many cultures that have been shunted into the shade by the rampant god of capitalism. We encountered it in a Mexican graveyard, for example. Part of Fosse’s appeal is that in a society where human ties are frayed to breaking point, he spells out the incontrovertible truths of our tragic connections. We are all children of someone who is a child of someone and so on and so forth. Aliss at the Fire spins out its slender cross-generational tale like a ghost story, one where the terrifying thing isn’t the jump scare: it’s the proximity of someone who is dead, the way they are just outside the window, looking in.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-85188426242765953232024-03-02T08:59:00.000-08:002024-03-02T08:59:48.670-08:00poor things (w&d lanthimos, w. tony mcnamara) <p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">I realise this is a stretch, but it crossed my mind that Lanthimos’ film is perhaps stepsister to Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, which I saw on the Montevideo stage last year. Like Faustus, Bella Baxter goes on an educational tour of Europe (the Grand Tour). Like Faustus, hers is a voyage of discovery: the limits of human pleasure, and power. Faustus is almost the anti-Hamlet, the proto-magic cyborg, who can indulge his whims at will, just as Bella does. Like Faustus, Bella satisfies her desires in an almost mechanical fashion, bereft of any eroticism. For all the sex in Lanthimos’ film, it is doggedly anti-erotic, in a Barthesian or Bataille-esque sense: this is sex as ‘furious jumping’ rather than an exploration of temptation or transgression. Faustus is a child of the devil; Bella Baxter is a child of a Scottish Frankenstein - neither are their own person, even if Lanthimos twists the tale at the end to suggest that this is where she is headed. Bella’s encounter with the radical sex worker echoes Faustus’ visit to Heidelberg, which is echoed by Hamlet’s academic companionship. All of which makes Bella a kind of Faust de nos jours, only one who rather than being condemned to hell, is rewarded for her vaulting ambition, as she is rebirthed into a 21st C variation of the happy nuclear family, with her husband, her lover and her tamed monster in a garden of Eden. If Marlowe’s Faust represents the last cry of medieval man, whose blind faith in magic/ knowledge will soon give way to Hamlet’s alienation, does Lanthimos’ Bella Baxter represent the last gasp of optimism in the possibilities of five centuries of faith in science and its empiricism?</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-46582195782452899032024-02-29T06:00:00.000-08:002024-02-29T06:00:18.110-08:00a tale of love and darkness (amos oz, tr nicholas de lange)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Oz’s lengthy book is part autobiography, part deep dive into his roots. The first half deals extensively with the Ukrainian origins of his mother’s family. He traces the routes of both sides of his family towards their arrival in the state that would soon become Israel. His mother’s subsequent decline in her new land is illustrative of the uneasy ties of Oz’s parents’ generation to their new land. They were bookish, urbane people who had deep ties to the lands they left behind, far from the arid soil of Palestine.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">The Palestinians themselves, as Oz makes clear in the two sequences where Palestinian people feature in this 700 page book, were a reminder of the immigrants’ foreignness. The Palestinians exist on the edge of this account, shadowy creatures who the new arrivals assume crave the annihilation of the newcomers. Which, from the perspective of the immigrants, has a certain logic, given the war footing at the founding of the state. Then, in two episodes, the young Oz succeeds in stepping out of his silo and having actual human interaction with Palestinians. In the first instance, Oz, aged 6, is dragged into an Arab-owned Jerusalem clothes shop by his nagging aunt. In the cavernous women’s clothes shop the child wanders off and finds himself terrified and lost, until he is rescued by the kindly Palestinian owner of the shop. In the second episode, an adolescent Oz is invited, the year before the state of Israel is officially brought to exist, to an event at the house of a wealthy Palestinian in an Arab quarter of Jerusalem. There, he is attracted to a young Palestinian girl, and seeking to show off, he causes a terrible accident to her young brother.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">For a contemporary reader, these incidents have more impact than almost anything else in the book. It’s impossible not to see them as parables, which Oz might have intended. The outsider clumsily trying to assert his presence, sowing disaster. What is perhaps curious is that the implication of these stories are never followed through. The Palestinians remain a categorical ‘other’ and return to the edge of the narrative. There is consciousness, but there is no attempt at reconciliation. Instead the dominant conflict in the writer’s worldview is between the immigrant Jews of his parents generation and the Kibbutzers who have another vision of Jewery, one that is active, vigorous, uncowed. Oz moves away from Jerusalem and becomes one of this new school, working on a rural kibbutz, to his father’s dismay.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">However, as the book sometimes makes clear, the story is still more complex than this. Because there has been another sector of the new Israel which has always existed, co-existing with the Palestinians, Christians and other sectors of society that made up this multicultural land. They too have been displaced from this narrative by the arrival of the immigrants. And the old Jerusalem that Oz catches glimpses of before the state of Israel is declared will soon be dismantled, with the arrival of the first Nakba. The Arab quarters will be annexed, geography rewritten, and the seeds of an ongoing, unresolvable crisis which will haunt Israel forever will be sown.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Oz’ account of the way the UN declaration of the state of Israel was received in Jerusalem and the war that followed is one of the most effective pieces of writing in the book. But every word about the hardship endured in those days now feels as though it has been mirrored and multiplied a million times by the violence inflicted on Gaza, part of that unacknowledged other which the new state has displaced.</span></p><p><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">“After that they talked for a while, the others, not my man, my man did not talk but just stroked my cheek and patted me twice on the shoulder and left. Who knows what he was called? Or if he’s still alive? Is he living in his home? Or in dirt and poverty, in some refugee camp?”</i></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Nb - i recognise that this is only one of Oz’s books and it might be injurious to comment on the author’s attitudes through a reading of this work alone. However, it is an autobiography, and as such feels representative of the new Israel’s first generation, something the writer’s accounts of his interaction with Ben Gurion only helps to reinforce. It’s also worth noting what Khoury has to say in My Name is Adam: </span><i style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">“I can’t understand how a novelist could write about Jerusalem without revealing the scale of the tragedy that befell the original inhabitants of the city’s western districts, which the Israelis occupied, expelling their occupants from their homes. I both blame him and wonder at him for not seeing the light in the stones of Jerusalem, of whose gradations of colour the Palestinian novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra wrote at such length. Oz saw only a dark city clothed in the fog of his European memories, but anyone who visits Jerusalem knows that it is a city of light and that its roseate stones radiate and glow even in the darkness.”</i></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-12378615896244248522024-02-26T07:25:00.000-08:002024-02-26T07:25:32.388-08:00el caso padilla (w&d pavel giroud)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">El Caso Padilla recounts the tale of the night the Cuban poet, Heberto Padilla was released from prison and proceeded to give a speech lasting several hours to his fellow writers in the hall of the Cuban Writers Union. The speech is a self-flagellation and a warning, and Padilla is clearly speaking under duress. He confesses to having written poetry which in its tone and its negativity is counter-revolutionary. He then goes on to name various writers who share his views, some of whom come forward to perform a public mea culpa after Padilla has finished speaking. The documentary is constructed around the filmed footage of the night, which the film claims at the start has never previously been seen, even though fragments were used in a play by the Cuban Abel Mello on the same subject around five years ago.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">The film is frustrating in many ways. In order to understand the context of his confession, it would have been helpful to have been given more of an insight into Padilla’s personality and history. At the end we learn that he emigrated to the USA, and sought to define himself as someone who was neither of the left or the right, although the trauma of these events must have scarred him. It’s one thing to confess to being a traitor, it’s another to implicate your friends and colleagues. It’s also frustrating that the film doesn’t offer any clue as to the fate of his fellow writers, characters who feel as though they emerge from an anti-Bolaño novel.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Which also leads on to the other thought the film provoked. Which is that writers might be free to say what they like under capitalism, but that’s because capitalism doesn’t give a shit about what they have to say. There’s also another kind of censorship under capitalism, which is the censorship of the market. The very fact that Castro, like Plato, may have felt threatened by the poets who were once his champions feels like a testament to a power that poetry still possesses within that society.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">All of which is not to defend censorship or the Cuban regime. Anyone who has visited Cuba will be aware of that it’s a society which is far from Utopian. Nevertheless, in a historical moment where, once again, the political and social values of “the West” are being stripped bare to reveal the brutality that underpins them, the case of Padilla feels as though it is probably more nuanced than the film suggests. It is perhaps worth mentioning that Mello, the playwright who wrote about a play about Padilla, was employed by a university in Havana to teach theatre when we met him there, in spite of his criticisms of the state and the fact he spends half his time in Spain. Cuba is complicated and the film, whilst doing a service in exploring the case of Padilla, doesn’t really do justice to these complexities. </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-90489860232958899582024-02-23T10:07:00.000-08:002024-02-23T10:07:58.581-08:00anatomy of a fall (w&d justine triet, w. arthur harari)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">[Warning, spoiler!] So, the blind kid’s anecdotal testimony swings the trial and gets his mum off a murder charge. The implausibility of this only helps to reveal the effectiveness of Triet’s clever</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">courtroom drama, (which isn’t really a courtroom drama). This is actually a movie about relationships more than anything else. Principally, Sandra’s relationship with her dead husband, her son and her lawyer. What are the limits to a relationship? Is trust more important than truth? Do conventional ideas about marriage have any real bearing on how relationships actually work?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">It’s curious that the script goes for the Rambertian decision to give the married couple the same first names as the actors who play them. There is much play made towards the latter part of the film and trial of the fact that Sandra’s life has echoes in her fiction, and that within the fiction might be found the truth of what happened on the day Samuel, her husband, died. In truth, this, like many of the strands in Anatomy, is slightly loose, an idea that is teased into our consciousness as we watch, without really going anywhere. Which is perhaps just as well, because had the film relied on this plank too much, it might have turned into a Branagh adaptation of Agatha Christie. In a similar way to the fact that Sandra’s charming lawyer, the baleful Swann Arlaud, is someone who was once in love with her. There’s no narrative reason for this to be the case, but it adds another ingredient to this complex soup of a film, which succeeds in part because so much mud is thrown at the wall that things are bound to stick. The lengthy argument scene, the only time Samuel speaks, is a fish out of the film’s water (perhaps reminiscent of the dialogue scene in Hunger), another of these quietly random elements that are stuck together to construct a film which …</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Which ultimately talks, as so many great films do, about society. It’s reminiscent of Farhadi’s A Separation, a film that took us inside the Iranian legal system to offer a sweeping portrait of its society. It feels as though Triet is using the theatricality of the courtroom as a lever to prise open questions about love, relationships, and how we, in the west, live now. The little lies which help to construct the basket within which we float down the stream. The legal interpretation of our actions and these lies, which is the codification of our morality, ends up being an instrument of blunt force, with which society attempts to perform its autopsies. The actuality of our actions and our lies lie beyond the law’s scope of true understanding. Sandra’s deceits may be innumerable and suggest guilt; her innocence or purity can only be inferred from her unreliable son’s unlikely tale, which is a form of love that transcends justice. </span></p><div><br /></div>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-64461441162270707042024-02-21T05:14:00.000-08:002024-02-21T05:14:37.511-08:00unrueh/ unrest (w&d cyril schäublin)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Schäublin’s curious film left both myself and sñr Flamia somewhat bemused. It’s a very elliptical telling of the way in which events at a Swiss watch factory on the 1870s influenced Kropotkin, who happened to be drifting around the valley where the factory is located at the time. The socialist principles of the watchmakers are emphasised as they offer to donate some of their wages to striking workers in Baltimore, part of a worldwide union movement that doesn’t prevent four of the female factory workers from being unjustly sacked. Kropotkin moseys around, looking out wistfully, perhaps nursing a crush on one of the factory workers. Whilst obviously based on facts, the film seems less concerned with exploring and developing its narrative and more interested in becoming a mood piece. Much is made of the element of time, with the valley having several different time zones. Whilst this helps to restrict the homogeneity of life, it also makes it hard to plan. It felt as though there was a lot bubbling under the surface of a likeable premise, but the lid is never lifted to release the full radical force of Kropotkin’s ideology on the audience. Which is a pity, as one suspects that the Cinemateca audience would have been well up for it.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-75096703273681585902024-02-19T09:31:00.000-08:002024-02-19T09:31:41.201-08:00le théorème de marguerite (w&d anna novion, w. agnès feuvre, marie-stéphane imbert, philippe paumier)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Novion’s film boasts four screenwriters, and feels as though it’s been polished and chiselled to kingdom come. It’s the story of a female mathematician who loses her way, discovers her inner woman, becomes a mahjong wizard, finds her way, loses herself in her obsessive quest for greatness, and finally finds love. As a narrative it’s as contrived as it sounds, hitting formulaic beats which may well have come out of a screenwriting textbook. Which is not to say that it’s ineffective. There’s a lot of craft in the construction of the film, plenty of art design, graphics, and a concerted effort to show us that maths isn’t boring. On the contrary, the true mathematician is an artist, seeking to unearth universal truths for the good of society. In many ways it feels as though Le Théorème de Marguerite</span><b style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </b><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">would make for a great case study. What makes for an effective movie as opposed to a great movie? Or are these criteria in any way useful? Perhaps someone can attempt to construct an equation to solve these riddles, or perhaps this is indeed the question that Marguerite is seeking a solution to, as she turns her walls into a beguiling work of cave art, which might just contain the secret to the universe.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-5094093569496366982024-02-17T14:59:00.000-08:002024-02-17T14:59:18.820-08:00walk up (w&d hong sang-soo)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Hong Sang-soo is a big lacuna in my film viewing, but I suspect that Walk Up isn’t the ideal place to start to get a handle on his work. Clearly a stocking filler, the film takes place in the same house which doubles as a restaurant. A film director visits an old friend with his daughter, and she offers to let him stay. Some time later, having not taken up the offer, he returns to the restaurant part of the house, where he hangs out with the friend and her friend, the restauranteur. At this point the director reveals that a big project has fallen through. He starts a relationship with the restauranteur, moving in to the house. He starts smoking heavily and drinking heavily. He gets depressed. He falls out with his friend who has now become his landlady, and doesn’t mend the leak in the roof. His daughter comes to visit. The film ends. The film is split into several long narrative sequences, which revolve around the use of the house and the steady deterioration of the gnomic film director. It’s languidly paced, with long talky scenes. In many ways it feels more like a stage play than a work of cinema, split into its various acts. Whilst there’s an undeniable charm, the film seems in danger of drowning in (self-referential?) whimsy. It provokes a hunger to see what happens beyond the walls of this hidden-away building, out there on the streets of Seoul. Whilst this is clearly intentional, Walk Up remains a charming but frustrating watch. Hopefully I will get a chance to see more of the director’s work, the films that didn’t get the rug pulled from them by the financiers.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-14259747551300491122024-02-15T18:45:00.000-08:002024-02-15T18:45:00.585-08:00visitation (jenny erpenbeck, tr susan bernofsky)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Erpenbeck’s novel reads almost as a collection of short stories. The unifying theme and principal protagonist is the house where the novel occurs, although in fact the singularity of the house is inaccurate, as the house is connected to a neighbouring house as well as a boat house, all of them situated by the side of a lake at a short distance to the east of Berlin. The novel has one fixed character, the gardener, a constant presence as the inhabitants of these spaces come and go. The gardener is allotted his own brief chapters, which intercut those of the changing cast. The novel’s conceit allows Erpenbeck to pirouette through modern German history. At one point the householders of the neighbouring house are Jewish, and they are forced to sell to the owner of the main house at a knock down price, which should help them to emigrate, but doesn’t. Another chapter is dedicated to a relative of the Jewish family who succeeded in getting out to South Africa, and whose memories of the German land are flavoured by his new surroundings and his sadness. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the most arresting chapters are those which occur before or after the war, including the fleeting stay of a Russian cavalry officer. The novel, though flowing towards the twenty first century, when the house will be demolished, is not afraid to step back in time on occasion. It’s a short, dense piece of writing, which harbours sadness, happiness and thwarted dreams, and offers a recondite vision of Germany’s complex twentieth century.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-83509940844245253082024-02-12T11:57:00.000-08:002024-02-12T11:57:48.705-08:00A touch of sin/ tian zhu ding (w&d jia zhang-ke)<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-emoji: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">Zhang-Ke’s magisterial film yokes complexity with simplicity, micro with macro, tragedy with comedy, violence and humour. Each of the four tales within the film employs the eternally potent dramatic tool of violence, to offer a savage X-ray of society, moving from high end hotels to scabrous street restaurants where anonymous faces slurp noodles like there’s no tomorrow. I was watching it with Mr Presno, who said at the end: But they can’t show that in China can they? How Zhang-Ke gets financing for his films remains a mystery but in many ways they give the lie to the idea of China as an overwhelmingly repressive state, in part because they are permitted to show the worst of the corruption and decadence of the new money with its communist party kickbacks. Despite being split into four parts, A Touch of Sin in many ways employs a classical narrative character framework. Each of the featured four flawed characters have to fight to find their significance within a world which reduces the individual to a part in a vast machine. Whether this is through the cathartic act of killing the bad guys, as in stories 1 and 3, or choosing a tragic end, as in story 4, or just assuming a role beyond the moral or social remit of society, as in the story 2, each character realises themselves though their capacity to enact violence. This model makes for straightforward storytelling, which is at the same time a radical critique of the society they emerge from. </p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-77096180853273287662024-02-09T07:50:00.000-08:002024-02-09T07:50:01.329-08:00the world/ shijie (w&d jia zhang-ke)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">The World is named for a theme park in Beijing which features selected wonders of the world, including Big Ben, a mini Manhattan complete with Twin Towers, (long after they have fallen), a mini Eiffel Tower as well as a Taj Mahal, a St Mark’s Square and other sundry wonders. The film follows the lives of several performers who participate in the shows staged in the theme park, where they dress up in national dress of different regions. Tao, the central character, appears as an Indian dancer and a Japanese geisha, among others. However, Tao longs to travel, and although the world is on their doorstep, few of the people who work there have ever been out of China. So Jia Zhang-Ke’s conceit takes shape: the image of a burgeoning China where the world appears to be opening up is nothing more than a simulacra. The reality is that this is a kind of prison. So far so Baudrillard. It’s also interesting to note that the film occurs just as mobile phones are starting to infiltrate the social web, another mechanism that appears to expand the world, but actually contracts it, with jealous individuals constantly asking why their partner hasn’t answered their call, using the phones as a tool to micro-manage day to day relationships.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Within this context, the film looks at the realities of the lives of these ordinary citizens, many of whom are internal immigrants, coming from rural parts of the country to participate in the economic boom. This is perhaps more typical Jia Zhang-Ke material, the struggle of its citizens to adapt to the rapidly changing face of China. What he succeeds in doing so skilfully is conjuring out of this material an overview of an entire society. By the time we reach Tao’s tragic end in a flat on an old industrial estate, a far cry from the fake glory of The World, it feels as though we have traversed the length and breadth of Chinese society, from high class karaoke joints for the elite to the desperate hotels where internal immigrants turn up when they first land in town. There are many things which make Jia Zhang-Ke one of the greatest living directors, but one of them is the sheer scale of his cinematic imagination. </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-2915109721593700812024-02-07T07:23:00.000-08:002024-02-07T07:23:22.790-08:00film after film (j hoberman)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Hoberson is a New York based critic. This collection is made up of three parts: selected reviews from his articles for the Village Voice, a more academic section on the evolution or non-evolution of cinema, and a central collection of essays on the relationship between film and the events of the era that he was writing in, which encompassed 9/11 and the Iraq war, among other things. Besides being well versed in both popular and “world” cinema, Hoberson also displays an academic frame of reference which isn’t always to be found in the work of Anglo-Saxon film critics, happy to refer to the obvious suspects such as Bazin, but also the likes of Virilio, Baudrillard etc, without fear of sounding pretentious. (That fear being the bane of Angel-Saxon writers.) The results, particularly in the central section of the book, are a welcome reminder of the idea that cinema, even in its most commercial guise, is intricately linked with the politics of the time in which it is produced. Notably, Hoberson traces the way that the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan were reflected by Hollywood, both literally and allegorically. He also refers to the “cinematic” dimension of the attack on the Twin Towers and the way in which the defence department summoned filmmakers from Hollywood to participate in blue sky debates about combatting America’s enemies. Apart from being studded with impeccable reviews, including films by Reygadas, McQueen and Kariostami, amongst many others, Hoberson’s book brilliantly yokes together a diverse range of films, from A History of Violence to Munich to A Mighty Heart, among many others. The overlap between geo-political ambition on a militaristic and cultural scale has rarely been so well analysed from a US perspective.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-56742755037602366982024-02-05T14:04:00.000-08:002024-02-05T14:04:40.653-08:00da-eum so-hee/ next sohee - (w&d july jung)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Jung’s film, whilst never radical, is a great example of how cinema acts as a portal to other parts of this small world. South Korea’s education system is frequently lauded in the West as a progressive example of the quest for excellence and the advantages of conformity. Next Sohee is a heartfelt corrective to this vision. Sohee, a bright but assertive student, is sent as part of her education to work in a call centre, where the female agents are expected to operate in as mechanical a fashion possible, convincing people who want to cancel their internet subscription to renew. Sonhee, whose secret dream is to be a dancer, rebels against the malfeasance of the company. She complains that it exploits the trainees, as well as protesting against the inhumanity of its commercial practices. But her protest comes at a terrible cost and leads to suicide. The second half of the film switches focus, with the female detective, Oh Yoo-jin, investigating the circumstances of Sonhee’s death. Her investigation takes her to the heart of a system that is both corrupt and inhumane. When her superior criticises her, saying that if they investigated every suicide they would be swamped, Oh Yoo-jin says that this is exactly what the police are for: to find out why and how society is flawed, and how that leads to tragedy. Whilst there is something discursive about all of this, the film is held together by the striking performances of its two female leads, Kim Si-Eun and Bae Doona who put raw flesh on the conceptual bones. Whilst never being a radical piece of filmmaking, Next Sohee succeeds in offering a telling portrayal of a society on the other side of the world, revealing the cracks in the South Korean economic miracle, reminding us that every society has its demons.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">It is also, for anyone who has ever had the misfortune to work in a call centre, a telling reminder of the stultifying nature of that particular means of employment.</span></p><div><br /></div>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-34530649283593225922024-02-02T07:05:00.000-08:002024-02-02T07:05:50.518-08:00beast in the shadows (edogawa ranpo, tr. ian hughes)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Rampo is a pseudonym for the writer, Tarō Hirai. This is a novel about detective story writers, who operate under pseudonyms. Reading wikipedia, I learn that some of the novels named in Beast in the Shadows were written by ‘Ranpo’ himself. In the novel they are the work of a sadistic detective story writer who threatens a woman who jilted him. The woman then seeks the support of the narrator, another writer of detective stories, supposedly the only one who might have a brain as twisted and wily as Detective story writer #1. When the woman’s husband is murdered in bizarre circumstances, the book becomes a whodunit, with the investigation taking place across the length and breadth of Tokyo. Learning that it was written in 1928 gives what might have been a dated feeling book the sense of actually being ahead of its time, notably in its arch portrayal of the sado-masochistic anti-heroine who the narrator ends up falling for, before starting to wonder if he is being manipulated by her. Beast in the Shadows is also an interesting example of Britain’s soft cultural power, as Hirai/ Ranpo was influenced by Chesterton and Conan Doyle, turning Tokyo into a dirty, foggy Edwardian soup of a city.</span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-81940743856664791992024-01-31T08:02:00.000-08:002024-01-31T08:02:38.622-08:00priscilla (w&d sofia coppola, w. priscilla presley, sandra harmon)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Glass Half Full</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Coppola looks at the other side of fame, stripping away Presley’s aura as she presents events from his young bride’s POV. Jacob Elordi’s Elvis is an anti-Elvis, all boyish moodiness and very little charisma. It’s a pared back performance which carefully deconstructs the myth, with Priscilla given centre stage. Her evolution from child bride to emancipated woman is convincingly rendered and one senses the director’s own journey from being a cog in the Coppola machine to becoming her own woman and director shadowing the film’s narrative.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Glass Half Empty</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Coppola’s uneasy film, which seems to have been deliberately stripped of emotion in a flat, monotone edit, never really comes to the boil. Seeking to tell the abusive story of Elvis’ child bride, railroaded into a claustrophobic world which is controlled by Elvis, his father, and the absent Colonel Parker, the film never engages fully with the conflict or abuse inherent to her situation. The film suffers from moments of arch cliché, such as the sequence where Priscilla and Elvis take a hackneyed LSD trip, scored by suitably ‘Indian’ music, or the predictable closing scenes. In the end, for all its endeavour, Priscilla falls into the biopic trap of trying to tell too much in too short a span of time, something which the director attempts to paper over with various lukewarm montage sequences. The desire to show Elvis as a proto-monster but also a loveable poet leads to a muddy, vacillating narrative which feels as though it can never quite make up its mind.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>
<p style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-emoji: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 15px;"><br /></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-21900936163201619892024-01-29T09:13:00.000-08:002024-01-29T09:13:13.237-08:00Iko shashvi mgalobeli / there was once a singing blackbird (w&d otar iosseliani,, w. sh. kakichashvili, dimitri eristavi) <p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Iosseliani’s second feature is a narrative-light account of a day in the life of a percussionist in Tbilisi. Gia is a freewheeling, happy-go-lucky percussionist in the orchestra. Something of a lothario, with an eye for the ladies and a galaxy of friends and acquaintances, his day is crammed to the gills with rehearsals, meetings, family and generally living his best life. He sometimes complains that he never has time for anything, but this is clearly down to the fact that he’s too busy running around being a lad about town. Played with a charming verve by Gela Kandelaki, Gia is a stepbrother to Agnes Varda’s Cleo or Keitel in Scorsese’s Who's That Knocking at My Door. What seems doubly remarkable about Iosseliani’s film is that despite the fact it is filmed behind ‘the iron curtain’ in the demonised USSR, Gia feels like a typical product of the late sixties, a figure endowed with so much personal freedom that it consumes him absolutely. There’s a lovely narrative strand where two visitors from Russia arrive at his home; he tells them to hang out until he gets back later, but in the social blizzard of his day he forgets all about them. Marine, played by the luminous Marina Kartsivadze, makes a cameo appearance and the film revolves around Gia’s capacity to time his entrance to play the kettle drums to the second, infuriating the conductor by only arriving in the nick of time. The film manages to remain compelling despite it being entirely episodic, with almost no attention paid to narrative: this is an immersive day in the life of a Tiblisi social butterfly and its 90 minutes are as thoroughly instructive and entertaining as the life of its protagonist, the singing blackbird of the title.</span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-56298668480193478992024-01-27T10:50:00.000-08:002024-01-27T10:50:26.221-08:00giorgobistve / falling leaves (w&d otar iosseliani, w. amiran chichinadze)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">I don’t think I have ever heard Otar Iosseliani, who died last month, being referenced in the British film world. Cinemateca is honouring him with a retrospective. This early film of his, shot in his native Georgia, is an engaging coming of age tale. It focuses on Nico, a young man who gets a job in a winery as a quality control inspector. The naive Nico, engagingly played by Ramaz Giorgobiani, soon learns that his job is meaningless: the quality of the wine is of secondary importance to the need to hit quotas. When he goes against the majority to declare that the wine in Barrel 49 is not good enough, (It’s like vinegar, another worker says), he is mocked. Nico is smitten by Marine, a neighbour, another who doesn’t take him seriously. When a local bully punches him in the eye for having the temerity to visit her, Nico suddenly turns. At work he takes it on himself to put Barrel 49 out of action and snubs Marine’s attempts to apologise. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Giorgobiani’s likeable performance holds the film together. But it’s clear that the director’s aim is to capture a portrait of his society. The film opens with on extended rural sequence, showing the vines being picked and turned into wine. Iosseliani then takes us into the homes, cafes and bars of the city. The camera darts around, capturing details, and the aesthetic feels akin to the French Nouvelle Vague or early Bertolucci. As such, the film builds up a compelling portrait of life in Soviet Georgia, which doesn’t seem so very different to life in any other part of Europe. Indeed, what is striking are the similarities, in terms of architecture, anxiety and ambition. Also notable is the representation of the female characters, Marine and her friend Lali, whose self-possession and confidence are in striking contrast to the naive Nico.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-771211785067373972024-01-25T10:52:00.000-08:002024-01-25T10:52:51.948-08:00baudolino (umberto eco, tr. william weaver)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Eco is a curious writer. One whose work as a semiotician attracted a whole generation of philosophy students and the admiration of many of Europe’s most prestigious intellectuals, but also one whose fame is based on a rip roaring medieval detective story. It’s many years since I read Name of the Rose, and in spite of labouring somewhat through Baudolino, I hope to return to it one of these days. Baudolino, tells the tale of the eponymous protagonist, who is adopted by Frederick Barbarossa, gets involved in all kinds of scrapes and battles with the emperor, before setting off on a hapless mission to find the kingdom of Prester John, the lost Christian prophet who reportedly ended up in the Indies. The novel is divided into two parts, written through forty chapters. The first deals largely with the Middle Ages politics of central and Eastern Europe. The second, a section that is more magical allegory, deals with Baudolino’s mission to the East in search of the lost prophet, and includes centaurs and cyclops other mythical creatures. There’s the sense of a writer straining to locate the precise register to tell what might have been a fascinating story, had that register been nailed down. Eco’s interest in pre-Renaissance Europe, aka the dark ages, is attractive. What were the people of that warlike continent like? Why is their history less well known than that of the Roman Empire? To what extent were the innumerable international conflicts a reflection of what we would now describe as globalisation? Where did our received idea of Europe end and the myths begin? These and other questions are latent in the text, but it never feels as though the writer quite gets to grips with them. As such, Baudolino is a lengthy curiosity, which lacks the narrative coherence of Name of the Rose.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-40570435088880479522024-01-23T06:59:00.000-08:002024-01-23T06:59:45.382-08:00heaven can wait (d. ernst lubitsch, w. samson raphaelson, leslie bush-fekete)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">I remember watching Ninotchka as well as To Be Or Not to Be, back in the mists of distant time. So I had a memory of Lubitsch as a subversive figure within the Hollywood cannon, someone with a measured European sophistication. In that regard, Heaven Can Wait felt like an anti-climax, with its conservative discourse on what makes for an ethical man. The apparent moral being that it’s ok to be a bit of a roguish philanderer, so long as you settle down sooner or later and marry a good woman. Don Ameche’s Van Cleve never seems wicked enough to be permitted entry to hell, which is what the initial set-up suggests.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Perhaps more interesting is the comparison between Heaven Can Wait and It’s A Wonderful Life, both films made in the shadow of war, which analyse the ethical question of what represents a well-lived and honorable life. At a time when death was riding pillion all over the world, this was clearly a pertinent issue, although both films neatly sidestep any political grandstanding. Both are helmed by European-born directors who would have been well versed in the Faust story, and both films adopt an upbeat, anti-Faustian position, where the everyday North American actions are given greater weight than vaulting European ambition. Faust goes to hell, whereas Van Cleve is promised heaven. This upbeat celebration of North American banality made sense in the forties, when the USA had ridden to Europe’s rescue and the tricky question of the country’s origins could still be ignored under the rubric of civilisation versus ‘the savages’. Films couldn’t be made without the technology of this civilisation, and film is what rescued both directors from the hell that Europe had recently become. All of which might help to explain the slightly soft-soap tone of Lubitsch’s popular film. </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6577380829683228320.post-68260684227490950872024-01-21T12:35:00.000-08:002024-01-21T12:35:27.834-08:00forgotten manuscript/ ultimas noticias de la escritura (w. sergio chejfec, tr. jeffery lawrence)<p><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;">Chejfec’s fiction has a dry charm and this non-fiction essay about the nature of writing in the pre and post digital age employs a similar tone. Broken up into 27 sections, the writer analyses the meaning of writing itself. Does a note in the margin of a book then become part of that book? Does reading a book on a screen alter the reader’s reception of said book to reading it on the page? How does the material consumption of a text affect interpretation? The book (which I read as a digital copy) poses all these and many more Barthesian questions, whilst permitting itself regular nods in the direction of the paterfamilias of Argentine literature, Borges.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-size: 13px;"> </span></p>maldororhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04465474258886954243noreply@blogger.com0