Antonioni

Le Amiche

Red Desert

Just a brief entry to celebrate the genius of Michelangelo Antonioni on the occasion of the revival of the devastatingly beautiful Le Amiche in a new print at Film Forum, and the long-overdue release of Red Desert on Criterion DVD. Of course Antonioni's haunting masterpiece L'Eclisse is the inspiration for the name of this blog, as evidenced in the photo that occupies the top of this page.

Great Moments in Cinema

Vive L'Amour

Muriel

The two clips above illustrate the use of extremely long takes (Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive L'Amour) vs. extremely rapid associational montage (Alain Resnais's Muriel). These two great directors use vastly different styles to great effect in analyzing the thought processes of these women. Resnais has always used a combination of montage to travel freely in time and space, and extremely fluid, beautiful tracking shots to immerse the viewer in a particular location. Tsai's style has maintained a largely static, carefully composed, contemplative style, although this early film has a more mobile camera as it follows this lonely woman through the park, before settling in for a powerful, seemingly endless still shot of her crying.

Au Hasard, Balthazar

The Long Day Closes

Above are two of the cinema's great uses of music to underscore dramatic action. Bresson's Au Hasard, Balthazar employs a Schubert sonata mixed with natural sounds (bells, the donkey's braying) to create one of the most shattering, transcendent endings in all of cinema. Terence Davies uses a pop song, Debbie Reynolds singing "Tammy," over a series of overhead tracking shots that ritualistically portray and link together the confines of a young boy's life: the bars on which he plays at home, the rows of desks at school, rows of pews in church, cinema, and back home. Davies creates hypnotic visual and aural rhythms unique in cinema.

Next Attraction

This is my first post with an embedded Youtube link. I finally figured out how to do it! The clip is silent.

Yesterday I saw Raya Martin's Next Attraction at the New York Filipino Film Festival and enjoyed it immensely, in spite of its being shown without subtitles. Although I don't speak Tagalog I had no trouble following this experimental, minimalist but highly entertaining film (projected in grainy DVD which also did not seriously detract from my appreciation). The premise is simple: most of the film is a series of long takes in color documenting the making of a short film, the action of which takes place offscreen. Finally the title of the short film appears: Next Attraction, A True Story. Now we see the complete film within the film, but shown silent and in black and white. Raya Martin said this was his coming-out film, and it depicts a young man (Coco Martin) having a fight with his mother (Jaclyn Jose), going out on the street, meeting another young man and having sex with him in the shower, then returning home to shower alone and think about what just happened. I think it's a fascinating example of a gay experimental film that succeeds by using formal strategies to make us complete the simple narrative for ourselves out of the incomplete bits and pieces presented to us.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival Preview

I'm looking forward to attending the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for the second year in a row the weekend of July 16-18. Some of the highlights for me include Rotaie, a late Italian silent directed by Mario Camerini, G.W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl starring the glorious Louise Brooks, and The Woman Disputed, co-directed by Henry King and Sam Taylor and starring Norma Talmadge. These three and most of the other films in the festival will be screened in 35mm prints (an increasingly endangered species) at the indispensable Castro Theater, which I always return to with a sense of awe.