Perhaps my favorite such 80’s/90’s family history the personal is political essay film. I’d really love to teach it some day.
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TÁR 2022
The truest thing about Tár—what registers its falsity most clearly—is the absence of Adèle Haenel, the indissociable co-star of ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ with Noémie Merlant, whose presence in Tár, like that of Nina Hoss, serves primarily to signify the film’s middle-brow seriousness, its imitativeness of European festival film. Haenel quit motion picture acting because she actually has politics.
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A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness 1977
Every time I watch or rewatch a Suzuki film, I gain a greater appreciation for the seriousness of his underlying worldview: the world is hentai—weird, grotesque—and the bad guys—men with money, capitalists without scruples—always win. In this hell world, all a body can do is laugh. What Beauvoir, or somebody, said of Sade also applies to Suzuki: he writes as the oppressor & reads as the oppressed.
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Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors 1965
Peak carnivalesque, folkloric modernism. Compositions of elemental power larded with mise-en-scène tumble across the screen. The cinematic image itself has never so resembled so many other, non-photographic media media: woodcuts, prints, tapestries, needlework images, storybooks, icons, Rodchenko, Ensor, Breughel, the opera stage, the altar, passion plays, et cetera.
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