(Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Kid with a Bike premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where it shared the Grand Prix with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. It is being released theatrically by Sundance Selects on 03.16.12.) The Kid with a Bike is propelled by eruptive moments nestled between long stretches of calm. That it is seen through the eyes of a child too young and confused to understand as much about himself as the viewer does would appear to make the eponymous bicycle rider’s case an ironic one, but it mostly just makes it sad. Every time […]
Second #4230, 70:30 In Roberto Bolaño’s short story “Days of 1978” (from the collection Last Evenings on Earth) one of the characters, upon hearing the voice of another character, suddenly and frightfully develops an unsettling and inexplicable image in his mind: It [the voice] conjures up a silent black-and-white film in which, all of a sudden, the characters start shouting incomprehensibly at the top of their voices, while a red line appears in the middle of the screen and begins to widen and spread. What to make of this? It’s nightmarish, but why? Perhaps it’s because what’s described is difficult […]
Second #4183, 69:43 In a passage from his 1952 essay “In Defense of Mixed Cinema,” André Bazin seems to predict the future, a future of watching movies in an age of interruptions and distractions. Bazin writes about watching Les Vampires (Louise Feuillade, 1915) during a night full of technical mishaps: That night only one of the two projectors was working. In addition, the print had no subtitles and I imagine that Feuillade would have had difficulty in trying to recognize the murderers. It was even money as to which were the good guys and which the bad. So difficult was […]
In a fit of extreme ballsiness, BAMcinématek is currently plummeting down the rabbit hole opened by Polish filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski, showcasing a complete retrospective appropriately entitled Hysterical Excess. Zulawaski’s films employ many hallmarks of genre filmmaking: the paranormal, the psychedelic, blood and guts. As well, beasties and boobies make appearances somewhat to excess, a tendency which has kept him from recognition as an “important” auteur despite a consistent aesthetic based on exhilarating camerawork (in collaboration with beloved cinematographer Andrzej Jaroszewicz) that swoops and dives like a bat one moment only to penetrate a bedroom with the tightest, most controlled zoom […]
Second #4136, 68:56 After Jeffrey strikes Dorothy, a roar of flames fills the frame. The barely repressed brute logic of the film finally explodes on the screen, as Jeffrey has, at last, become a surrogate Frank. What’s remarkable about the scene is how it’s fashioned from some pretty regressive clichés about abuse, especially in how Dorothy literally “asks for it.” On one level, Blue Velvet’s depiction of women is deformed in the worst possible ways, as it balances Sandy as the objectified virginal “good” girl, full of nurturing love, and Dorothy as the madwoman whore. There’s nothing in between, and […]
2,637. That’s the number of days it has been since I was in Austin, TX. My wife and I moved there right after working a full season at the Maine Workshops, and the moment we arrived we realized we absolutely loved the place…and there was no way we could stay. At the time (and until I’m dead it seems) I owed an incredible amount of money in school loans and 2004 seemed to be the year everyone decided to stay, or move to Austin…I considered working at Jamba Juice after two months without a job…I said “considered.” We were flat […]
(Attenberg world premiered at the 2010 Venice Film Festival and is being distributed in America by Strand Releasing. It opens on Friday, March 9, 2012, at the IFC Center in NYC. Visit the film’s official page at the Strand website to learn more.) The world would be a much less grating place if certain cinematic sub-genres were to be banned from the table immediately. Reading a description of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg, one might worry that she has committed the double-sin of embracing two of the more increasingly overused and deplorable ones: 1) the “stunted-to-the-point-of-retarded adult-child;” and 2) the “quirky […]
Second #4089, 68:09 1. Dorothy to Jeffrey: “Do you want to do bad things? / Anything . . . anything. / I want you to hurt me.” 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Experience (1844): It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. . . . Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have […]
Second #4042, 67:22 In a 1964 interview Orson Welles talked about the relationship between the visual and the spoken word in film. He said that I couldn’t arrive at [the visual] without the solidity of the word taken as a basic for constructing the images. What happens is that when the visual components are shot the words are obscured. The most classical example is Lady from Shanghai. The scene in the aquarium was so gripping visually that no one heard what was being said. And what was said was, for all that, the marrow of the film. Could Lady from […]
Second #3995, 66:35 1. Jeffrey, just after the kiss with Sandy, is on his way up the dark, industrially-vibed staircase to Dorothy’s apartment. He has had his chaste kiss; new he wants more. He is hungry for Dorothy, who dispenses with shy-girl playfulness and gives Jeffrey the Real Thing. 2. The blackness of the frame. The amount of screen space dedicated to the experience of no visible light. There is light, of course–just enough–but Jeffrey travels in these moments mostly through the dark. 3. In He Died with His Eyes Open, the first of Derek Raymond’s British crime noir Factory […]