Now presenting, Man With a Movie Camera…
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There exists a mechanical instrument that allows one to peel away strips of time and control them. This instrument, understood simply, is a tool of transcription or recording. It captures light-rays. Understood on a slightly more involved level, it becomes apparent that the tool does not simply capture light, but time. To be precise: it transmutes time into a material strip of frames, which can then be…
Oh man, where do I start? Persona defies interpretation; in fact, one of the many themes of the film is the very struggle with interpretation. This film has so many different ways to interpret it that you could watch it hundreds of times and see something new each time. (it blows my mind how complex Persona manages to be in just 85 minutes). At the core of the film— the thread that runs through it all— is duality. The duality of things…
The two of them are the twin femme fatales of an artform held in opposition. They are a Venn diagram that comes to align only upon the specific style of Jacques Rivette, his cinema that straddles the mysteries of the screen and the stage. Not wholly realistic, cinematic, theatric, or mystic, the two women are instead an incohesion of all the above. They are a suspension of artifice, an immiscible ache in the shape of a human. Everywhere they go,…
Slow in time and broad in the first movements of its story, but the further it unspools the more it erodes an elemental path. Fire, water, and earth are each potent symbols— forces of tension, political power, or spiritual mystery. Vláčil’s strong two-shots show character dynamics through the shifting of focus, depth of perspective, or a subtle change of blocking. But the real strength of the film is the dreamlike poeticism that flows right beneath its surface and causes its images to cling to the mind.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
The ultimate capitalistic fantasy: taste the pure possibility of the multiverse and then return to dutifully do your taxes. That is only one of the ways this film espouses the pernicious ideology of capitalism; such values are embedded in the very fabric of its conceptually inconsistent multiverse. The maximalist excess, the superficial thought, the rush of spectacle, the triumph of the individual— these are the implicit and explicit outcomes of the capitalist system, and also the driving forces of the…
Watching this film was like trying to scale an immense glacier. A cold and distant and repetitive ascent. Scrabbling along a slick surface, severely steep, nearly insurmountable, no handholds or footholds, nowhere to find purchase or access. The struggle of a climb against a surface that closes itself off, a story that actively resists itself. Along an incline so steep it's nearly vertical, with only the most minimal of forward momentum. The film is an arduous endurance test: nearly four…
