WELCOME TO THE ETHER
Whenever binocular vision is depicted in cinema as two circles joined in the middle, you are being told an optical lie. The two eyes are but lenses through which the mind sees together but one image. When you look through binoculars, the mind sees not two circles but one.
And so the circular, telescopic vision of The Forgotten Colours of Dreams produces a forceful distancing effect disembodying the viewer from all the material sense data being…
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k_8e6QIS3o
This 1991 short cemented Andersson’s conversion away from realism and marked the path to his Living Trilogy. Its Swedish title “Härlig är jorden” comes from a Christian hymn and translates as “Lovely Is the Earth.” Epitomizing the life of a tall, mustachioed, professional-class Swedish man, an estate agent, the film compresses all that needs to be said in 15 brief scenes — carefully composed images statically captured and arranged in a parabolic structure.
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1) Holocaust truck, the screaming…
The deep conclusion we are left to draw from this movie — deeper still than Twin Perfect’s excellent interpretation — is that homosexuality and masturbation, lustful fantasy and murder, Hollywood fantasy and suicide, all follow the same typological pattern. And they lead to the same place, pronounced by the blue-haired script supervisor as “Silencio”. People who would abhor that conclusion if presented with it, yet adore the movie. They appreciate the sympathy to their situation, I guess. We all just…
Since his death, in retrospect, this is David Lynch’s most ominous film. In Lost Highway, David Lynch watches his own death and sees his own complicity in it. The credits at the beginning and end, set to David Bowie’s “I’m Deranged”, show us a rapid ghost ride through a highway of darkness, like the stream of no-thing from which we come and to which we depart.
The first shot after the credits is a close-up of the antihero smoking, and…
TRACK LISTING
1. Deaf/Punk (1979), by Richard Gaikowski [0:00:13–0:07:11]
2. In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution (1976), by Chuck Statler [0:07:12–0:17:05]
3. The Residents: The Third Reich ’n Roll (1977), by The Residents [0:17:06–0:21:52]
4. Hello Skinny (1979), by Graeme Whifler [0:21:53–0:24:53]
5. One Minute Movies (1980), by Graeme Whifler [0:24:54–0:29:44]
— Moisture [0:25:18–0:26:21]
— Act of Being Polite [0:26:22–0:27:24]
— Perfect Love [0:27:25–0:28:28]
— The Simple Song [0:28:29–0:29:31]
6. MX-80: Why Are We Here? (1981),…
1. 0:00:51–0:16:42 Apichatpong Weerasethakul, “Luminous People”
2. 0:16:42–0:36:23 Vicente Ferraz, “Germano”
3. 0:36:23–0:52:38 Ayisha Abraham, “One Way”
4. 0:52:38–1:06:36 Wang Bing, “Brutality Factory”
5. 1:06:36–1:22:40 Pedro Costa, “Tarrafal”
6. 1:22:40–1:37:46 Chantal Akerman, “Tombée de nuit sur Shanghai”
