Category: 1970s Cinema
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Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
From its first shot, here is a film that invites its own phenomenology, another potential description or requirement of the art film. We slowly zoom into a line of men descending a South American mountain. The aspect ratio must be 4:3, because the screen is working with an unusual vertical movement, human vertical movement. It’s…
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Viewing Log: August 2013, Vol. I
Pépé le Moko (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1937) – A masterpiece of setting and staging. It’s in Algiers, within the Casbah, and it treats its environs and those native to it as simply mise-en-scene, but this is to be expected from 1930s poetic realism. Everything about this is “classic,” exactly what defines the “golden age” of…
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Viewing Log: January 2013
Breathless (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) – Other than obligatory and ubiquitous clips, have probably only sat through Breathless twice. What can you say about it that hasn’t already been said ad nauseum? Watch it and you’ll be struck by how deliberately iconic it wants to be. It’s iconic in the secondary sense, for the most part,…
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Viewing Log, 12/9/2012 – 12/21/2012
Magic Mike (dir. Steven Soderberg, 2011) – Despite a lot of time trying to find reasons to validate this film from a critical perspective, it seems mainly noteworthy for being a film by a director with art-house street-cred that tries to switch conventional gender roles. From beginning to end, it’s the women who end dates…
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Catch-Up, cont’d: 11/2012-12/2012
Skyfall (dir. Sam Mendes, 2012) – Really want/need to see it again, but here’s the first of the Craig-era Bond films that tries to get away from the Bourne legacy (as it were). Major shift in narrative gears here, with Bond’s role as protector of the maternal figure he had previously been defying. He’s no…
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Catch-Up: 10/2012 – 11/2012
We’ll see how this goes. It’s going to start as a list, with attempts to fill in the space between titles with whatever jumps to memory. All About My Mother (Todo Sobre Mi Madre) (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) – Another one for film & melodrama. Did a scene analysis of the sequence wherein Manuela transitions…
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Viewing Log, Week of 9/23/2012
Nashville (dir. Robert Altman, 1975) – Amazing how much you can forget about a film in five days. Nashville came across as so much more scathing this time around than last time (around 4 years ago). The attention Altman pays to the triumphalistic attitude of nationalism that defines his vision of the South in the…
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Viewing Log, Week of 9/9/2012
Albatross (dir. Niall MacCormick, 2011) – An “independent,” acting-driven story about how “coming of age” is accompanied by lots of challenges, although these challenges seem quite avoidable and fairly atypical. This is all story, and it doesn’t know where its sympathies lie. Boogie Woogie (dir. Duncan Ward, 2009) – Anything that mocks the upper-class art…
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Viewing Log, Week of 8/26/2012
The Bourne Legacy (dir. Tony Gilroy, 2012) – It rewards fluency in the first three, although not in a deeply satisfying way. It shows itself as something different not just in terms of the main character being replaced/absent. The camera work is wholly different, losing much of the shaky, handheld style for something much more…
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Viewing Log, Week of 8/12/2012 (Vol. II)
Mouchette (dir. Robert Bresson, 1967) – And that completes half of Bresson’s oeuvre. Still need to see the first two and the last four. Mouchette contains many clear similarities with Au hasard Balthazar, released only a couple years prior. They’re both about cruelty in the world and the resulting tragedy when cruelty singles out and…
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Viewing Log, Week of 7/15/2012
Play Time (dir. Jacques Tati, 1967) – This was goofy but not only that, maybe something approaching a Chesterton comedy, Father Brown or something. A clear critique of all things Modern and a substantive study of spaces, Play Time highlights form over narrative, sounds over dialogue, human over mechanistic, curves over straight lines, and colors…
Precious Bodily Fluids 