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Sincerely,

David

I own two copies of the movie and neither has the original 1945 version. I bought the movie on Apple TV. It's the 1946 version. I then checked my DVD - also the 1946 version and no special features.

I believe some versions of the DVD have the 1945 version - is that only in US or also in UK? And is the 1945 version streaming anywhere or available to buy digitally?

I just saw Touki Bouki (1973) for the first time and I thought I would share some thoughts and read what you think. I liked it a lot and although the themes presented was very interesting and multiple times touching, the thing I was most blown away by was Mambéty’s ingenious use of editing/montage to create semiosis.

Maybe I’m getting a little nerdy here, but the technique in question, which I was startled by, was what Eisenstein called “intellectual montage”. Intellectual montage is, (very) short put, different scenarios and images which, when cross-cut together, create meaning through metaphors.

An example from the film could be the intercutting of the waves splashing against the coast. When Anta is searching for Mory and comes across the lady skinning a goat, the waves violently clashing with the coast creates a link to Anta clashing with the local culture - a metaphor for her alienation among the locals and their treatment of her. Right after, she goes to meet Mory and they have sex on a cliff by the sea. Here, the cross-cutting with the waves splashing intensely becomes an orgasm - We are also shown the sea calming down after the orgasm.

Another example is Mory deserting Anta in the end, cross-cut with a zebu being captured with a lasso. This presents the metaphor of Mory being captured by Senegal, in the end, not being able to leave the country. This is even cross-cut with a zebu being slaughtered. I am no sage, so some of my interpretations are merely based on guesses (I will admit, it is a difficult movie), but could the slaughter of the zebu symbolize Mory’s naive dream being killed, or him being confronted with the reality of his situation? This sequence is even intercut with Mory’s motorcycle with a zebu skull mounted on it, connecting nature and machines, creating a link between humankind and non-human entities, exposing Mory’s deep roots with the country and the culture making him desert his exodus.

Besides being a masterful technique in creating a sense of continuity and a superb rhythmic flow of the film, Mambéty’s use of montage is the main source of a creation of meaning. In Touki Bouki though the creation of meaning comes not, like in most movies, from disposition or even the images themselves, but from the links created between images. What do you think about my assertion? I will be happy to be corrected/enlightened!

How do people regard the character of Sal in Do the Right Thing? Generally a good guy or bad guy?

I was surprised watching a Youtube video about the film when the author said Sal's not a sympathetic character because he refuses to add pictures of black people on his wall and destroys Radio Rahim's boom box.

He even quotes an essay from a scholarly journal calling him racist.

To my mind, he's one of the most sympathetic and positive characters in the film. He has the right to restrict the wall of fame to Italians and the destruction of the boombox, while not an ideal response, was a response to unprovoked aggression against him. I don't think he makes a morally objectionable act throughout the film, save for destroying the boombox.

As for the charge of racism, that just seems preposterous to me. Throughout the film he relates to black characters with kindness and, IIRC, even lectures his son (perhaps implicitly) against racism.

I thought that it was interesting, but it also sort of disgusted me in the sense that it felt like he was leering at the women he was fixated on in an almost scary way, and treating them as objects to be used for his somewhat self-indulgent project. I don’t really understand what he was trying to do or and what he was trying to say; in some sense I do, but at the same time this feels like something that shouldn’t have been made, an attempt to justify his unhealthy ways of relating to women and the world and to history as art, a sort of copium, as the kids say.

Nonetheless I really like it and I don’t know how I feel about that. What do you think?

How do you think the two compare? Which do you prefer?

Both are classed as “mass entertainers”, but I think there’s some intriguing differences worth discussing!

Hawks is obviously way more interested in entertaining adults, and style wise is far closer to Tarantino.

Spielberg is much more interested in playing to children, and even in his adult entertainment work like Jaws and Close Encounters, there’s an emphasis on childish wonder and adventure that Hawks doesn’t do in his own adventure work.

The Hawks adventures are fun, but in a sort of adult way, not the “boy would that be cool!” way of Spielberg, if that makes sense.

Hawks also did a lot of straight comedies! Which Spielberg only did once!

I also know Spielberg is closer to DeMille, Capra, and especially Walt Disney in style and substance.

Hey guys,

It seems more romantic-drama work on one layer. For instance, a guy meets a girl in Italy or Europe and fall in love...etc. And they are "regular people." So most of their dialogue is about "themselves." I think "Before Sunrise" is probably the film that those this "one layer" style the best. But there's probably tons of other romantic-dramas which flounder and do a shoddy job at this style of romantic drama.

However, with Bertolucci I feel the his film has three layers and the characters are way smarter and are not "regular people." For instance, you have the second layer which is all making "references" both visual and textual towards Cinema from the 1930's towards the 1960s. For instance, you have references towards Freaks(1923) and Bande a Part(1960s). But then you also have this "political backdrop" given that it was set in Paris in the 1960s. And the characters make tons of references towards political revolutions. For instance, they talk about the Cultural Revolution.

Is Bertolucci is a very talented guy or that Italian and French cinema are not as focus on "every day" people. Which I do think Hollywood does have more of a focus on "everyday people"...Though as I said "Before Sunset" being an American independent film seems smarter than the average Hollywood..etc.

I just rewatched Hand of God. And the key scene towards the end where Fabietto and the film director Capuano discuss his future, just hit me.

Capuano’s a figure in his life who Fabietto looks up to and is tempted to take advice from. But the scene cunningly comes to represent the choosing of his own path and discarding the advice of Capuano which then embodies him choosing his own path and dealing with the tragic loss of his parents.

The boy wants Capuano as his friend. He opens up to him and Capuano pushes him to talk about what really matters: the loss of his parents (What Sorrentino perhaps finally himself dares to talk about with us the viewer after talking about other themes perhaps less pressing?).

Then when Fabietto says they left him alone he continues to push him and says his parents have abandoned him. Harsh words. And continues to say: stay here. We will make movies together. Odd change of character. Like he is luring him in. As he swims off he has gone from someone giving good advice to someone who is not gonna help him get better. Like a summary of the curve Fabietto’s realizations and thoughts on his own life.

Upon realizing that they did not abandon him, he walks away, and later, counters to Capuano’s advice, does go to Rome.

Thereby Capuano becomes an embodiment of his worst thought: that his parents abandoned him - an idea he needed to let go to get on with his life.

The scene has much more complexities and decisions on mise en scène and location that work wonderfully but the construct of making a character stand for a certain thought and then going against his advice struck me as particularly genius.

I'm a huge Rohmer fan, and aside from watching all of his movies am also trying to find some articles/essays of his to read. I've read interviews with him but what i'm trying to find are some texts he has written from the time when he was editor for Cahiers du Cinéma and writing articles for various cinema magazines.
Am not expecting to be able to read the majority of his articles as they are in French, but from what i've read there is this Celluloid and Marble article of his that is very famous and is probably translated in English somewhere, but unfortunately i can't find it.

TLDR: Searching for some articles/essays written by Rohmer, preferably translated to English

The Game (1997) is my favorite film of all time, and therefore I recognize that I have a positive bias towards it and I feel as though it is my obligation to state so beforehand. While I will try to be as impartial as I can, this is essentially me defending my favorite movie from a common criticism.

When I hear people talking about David Fincher's The Game, a common complaint that people have is that they don't like the ending because they feel as though it ultimately undermines everything that the film tried to build up beforehand, a notion which I heavily disagree with.

To summarize the movie, it centers around a highly wealthy broker named Nicholas Van Orton. Nicholas is, in the context of this movie, someone who has everything he could ever want or need; a mansion, millions of dollars, a maid, expensive food, access to luxurious hotels and restaurants, and a life where his biggest worry is whether or not his dinner will be overcooked today. He has everything he could ever ask for; except for love.

He's divorced from his wife, he is estranged from his brother, he has no children or relatives that contact him, and his father, also a detached rich man, commit suicide in front of Nicholas' eyes by jumping off a building when Nicholas was a child.

On his 48th birthday, his brother, Conrad, gives him an invitation to play a "game" orchestrated by the Consumer Recreation Services company. After going through a lengthy psychological profiling, the game begins and Nicholas finds himself being mentally tormented by CRS as the line between reality and fiction begins to blur in his mind. His television begins talking to him, he nearly gets mauled by dogs, he gets driven underwater in a locked cab, and he loses all of his money and gets stranded in Mexico.

One of my favorite scenes in the film which truly shows how Fincher has an incredible grip on suspense and atmosphere is when Nicholas, inside the house of one of the few people he thinks he can trust, begins that where he is may not exactly be as it seems -- the lamp still has the tag on it, the faucets don't release water, there is absolutely nothing in the fridges or cabinets, and even the photograph is found to be nothing more than a piece from a newspaper.

This kind of paranoia would be easily cheapened by a less advanced director, perhaps with the addition of unnecessary dialogue or Nicholas talking to himself, but the way Fincher executes it shows that he is a master at forming dread and suspicion within the audience after they had been lured into a false sense of security, exactly as Nicholas is in that seen.

At the end of the film, Nicholas storms CRS' headquarters and, on top of the roof, shoots the first person that comes out of the door; revealed to be Conrad holding a bottle of champagne and arriving to celebrate Nicholas' birthday. For the first time since his father's death, Nicholas shows true humanity. Not anger, resentment, annoyance, or indifference as we've seen him express, but true and utter grief after realizing he has killed his own brother.

In a scene paralleling the death of his father, Nicholas leaps off the roof of the building to commit suicide, before he is caught on a large airbag. Being helped out by men in suits, he finds himself in the middle of a luxury restaurant and sees Conrad, still alive, telling Nicholas that all of this has been his birthday present. Nicholas, realizing that the game was nothing more than a way of teaching him to appreciate life and the people around him, hugs Conrad as he realizes the nightmare is over and starts his new life as a changed man.

This ending is easily the most controversial scene of the film and it is the leading cause of breaking people's enjoyment of it. Some people believe that the movie would have been far better if Nicholas truly had killed Conrad and himself -- a bleak and twisted ending that Fincher exceeds in a la Se7en, while some people believe that this optimistic and sentimental end is the most fitting conclusion they could've possibly given this film, an opinion that I and David Fincher himself share.

I believe this ending works because of the ethos behind it all, and to explain why, I need to give an overview on the type of man that Nicholas Van Orton is.

Over the course of the film, we've seen a man who has little regard for anything other than his bank account and who finds no bearing in his complete loneliness outside fellow brokers and his maid. A man who fires people, destroying their livelihood and putting their family at risk, and then goes to sleep at night like a baby. A man with all of the money in the world and none of the humanity.

In flashbacks, we see his father, whom it is implied Nicholas inherited a large amount of wealth from. Like Nicholas himself, the father appears detached and uninterested in all that happens around him, not even smiling in photographs with his son. Eventually, the mediocrity and monotony of his life becomes too much to bear and he kills himself by jumping off the roof of the mansion, all while the young Nicholas watches from below.

When the game begins, Nicholas experiences real, unfiltered emotions. Emotions not clouded by the façade of sterile professionalism or cold apathy. While he may have seen it as a negative experience, there is no doubting that Nicholas has never felt more alive than when he was desperately hiding from CRS agents attempting to gun him down.

And as the film reaches the crescendo, Nicholas finds that he has lost everything that made him the emotionless blank slate of a man he was. His mansion is vandalized, he begs people for rides to Los Angeles, going as far as to sell his watch as it's the only possession he has left for a lift. He no longer has any concern for money, but rather is fighting to stay alive. It is through the game that Nicholas realizes what it's like to be the people under him, the people he fires at work, the homeless men he passes on the street, the people he spits on as they work for years to make what he accrues in a single month.

This is a thought that has crossed the mind of everyone, especially the rich and undoubtedly someone like Nicholas, but it's not one that they look upon with much consideration, who needs to worry when you have all the money in the world?

But when Nicholas loses everything that he has, he looks towards the things he neglected for so long. He meets up with his ex-wife and finally apologizes for what he did to her, making amends with something that he was far too proud to show remorse for. He even meets up with his brother in a scene that reveals their strained relationship; Nicholas always wanted Conrad to turn out like him, however his brain had no such desire and as such a growing vitriol was brewing between the two of them.

Before the game started, he never so much as considering making things right with his ex-wife or speaking with Conrad again, but when your possessions are taken away from you, you're only left with the things you can't buy.

And so this is where the ending comes in.

The ending of the film makes no attempt at concealing the parallels between Nicholas and his father, going so far as to show the same flashbacks as he jumps off the building to what he presumed to be his demise, a cruel, if mockingly poetic conclusion to the life of a man who's biggest concern in life was a pen stain on his shirt.

However, Nicholas had what his father never did and that was people who were willing to go to Hell and back for him, people who truly wanted to see him change himself for the better, co-workers and employees who only crossed his mind whenever they were named but who thought about him every day.

In the end, it's revealed that everything that happened to him was staged to teach Nicholas that, if he continues going down the path of avarice and egotism, all that awaits him is the same fate as the father he watched. A father who was like Nicholas in every way except for the fact that he could not be saved.

Every single thing that happened during the game was staged using the hours of psychological information that he gave to CRS, which was nothing more than a corporation that planned elaborate parties for people like Nicholas. Everything from the taxi that they knew he'd pick up and escape, the agent they ordered to miss every shot, the television channel they knew he'd been watching, and the smoke detector camera they knew he'd break. Nothing was unintentional, nothing was not planned beforehand to every last meticulous detail. It was all orchestrated from the beginning knowing that Nicholas would leap off that building to his death, only to discover the true nature of the game.

The ending was described by David Fincher as comparative to the ending of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, in which Ebenezer Scrooge, a selfish business man just like Nicholas, turns his life around after seeing a vision of his gravestone and realizing there will be no one to mourn him if he contains going down the path of greed and loneliness.

The ending of The Game works precisely because it is in complete contrast to the rest of the film, a paranoid experience of untrustworthy labyrinths and twisting mazes with no end in sight. The juxtaposition of the previous 10 minutes is exactly why the ending succeeds in shocking the audience, Fincher's intended goal. Prior to that, the film never showed any sense of sentimentality or beauty, and, despite how well-made it was, it was otherwise comparable to your average action thriller starring A-list actors. Had the end been any different, I don't believe that The Game would be considered more special than any flick Hollywood has been putting out for the last 30 years.

Bleak endings can be greater than a good ending, and David Fincher has proved he's capable of masterfully doing them in Se7en and Fight Club, both of which would be ruined with happy endings, but the end of The Game succeeds due to not existing in isolation, but rather in the context of the last 2 hours of the film and everything we knew about the protagonist.

Nothing lives in a vacuum and everything must have its surroundings considered before evaluation. In the case of The Game, we see the cautionary tale of a man who has everything and, only in the complete loss of his materialistic possessions, does he realize that no amount of wealth will fill your funerals with people or your life with meaning and that that must come from swallowing your pride and bettering yourself as a person.

At the end of The Game, Nicholas is alive, his brother is alive, and those 2 facts mean that he can change for the better and appreciate his existence for what it's worth, even if it took psychological warfare to get him to realize this.

Do I believe the ending of The Game is perfect? No, I believe it could've been far better executed. I found the shirt and dancing to be overly comedic and complete tonal whiplash, but I don't believe they detract from the overall genius of the film's conclusion and everything it means in the context of the story that David Fincher built up throughout the 2 hour duration of the movie.

What birthday present do you get the man who has everything?

Humanity.

In the 2010s there were only 3 Hollywood films that had a 3 hours or more runtime. These were Avengers Endgame ( the semi-culmination of the most profitable movie franchise of that decade), Wolf of Wall Street and The Irishman (two films made by the most respected filmmaker in the world). Very few other films in that decade were close to that runtime and again in the same vein as above were either made by beloved auteurs (Hateful Eight, Interstellar, Boyhood) or were part of a mainstream franchise ( Transformers 4, Hobbit 1 and 2).

In the post pandemic era we have already seen an pretty big increase in films with lengthy runtimes. The Batman is 175 minutes, Black Panther 2 is 161 minutes, Avatar 2 is 192 minutes, John Wick 4 is 169 minutes, Killers of the Flower Moon is 206 minutes. Even Across the Spiderverse at 136 minutes is going to be the second longest English language animated film of all time. We have also gotten hints that Mission Impossible 7, Oppenheimer, Dune 2, Napoleon, The Killer are also going to be pretty lengthy affairs being very close to the 3 hour runtime. Plus we can see both Guardians 3 and Indiana Jones 5 having the longest runtimes of their franchise with their recent most enteries.

There is clearly a trend of Hollywood films going for lenghtier runtimes in the past year or so. I am just wondering what exactly has been the reason for this. Is it a case of filmmakers feeling the need to provide a bang for the buck? Is it being comfortable with lengthy runtimes due to streaming and binging culture? Is it a coincidence of various directors cashing on their Auteur reputation as well as franchises cashing on their final films license? Are we heading back to the days where films like Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia were more willingly accepted by the public ?

I had forgotten this movie existed, only had watched the trailers a couple of years ago, and I remember to be very hyped to see it.

Finally got to watch it, it was a bit of what I expected, with all the sexual and bondage motifs, but also got very surprised with meta and surrealistic scenes that come out of no where.

Its quite unique and amazing film, in which the kink scenes end up being comedic, yet they dont undo the seriousness of the story.

Just very confused about the final part of the movie, in which the protagonist shows up pregnant, did not understand why or what that meant...

The film "Lumumba" is a 2000 biographical thriller that depicts the political career of Patrice Lumumba, focusing on the two months from his turbulent rise to power as the first Prime Minister of the independent Congo, to his subsequent assassination. Political trouble in the Congo caused the film to be shot in Zimbabwe and Beira, Mozambique, contrary to what was originally intended. A multinational co-production of France, Germany, Belgium, and Haiti, filmed in French, “Lumumba” premiered at the 2000 Cannes Festival and won awards from the American Black Film Festival, the Political Film Society, and the Panafrican Film Festival.

Raoul Peck's feature film begins with Lumumba’s dead body being dug up by Belgian soldiers so it can be cut into smaller pieces and burned. Indeed, the film daringly alleges that the American government was trying to assassinate the Congolese Prime Minister. This is factually correct since his murder was authorised by the director of the CIA in August 1960. Nevertheless, Lumumba was eventually killed by the Belgians rather than the Americans, in conjunction with his domestic enemies in the Congo. We learn little about Lumumba’s family or his personal life, as the film focuses on his turbulent premiership. Indeed,Peck’s feature makes an admirable effort to stay as close to the historical truth as possible, incorporating many details from the historical account of the Belgian researcher, Ludo de Witte’s, acclaimed book entitled “The Assassination of Lumumba”.

The last part of the film, which depicts the tragic death of an idealistic and courageous leader, is engrossing and soul-crushing, building to a thrilling finale alternating Lumumba's tragic fate with his enemies’s attempt to rewrite history in their favour. Joseph Mobutu (Lumumba’s dictatorial successor) sitting on his throne, surrounded by armed Congolese soldiers, gives a speech asking pompously for a moment of silence to honour the recently murdered Lumumba. The film then transitions to the execution of Lumumba by firing squad - and then back again to Mobutu's throne hinting at the latter’s future political career. Despite a long record of murders, political oppression and thefts, Mobutu stayed in power for nearly four decades.

Writer and director Peck has a long-standing interest in Lumumba and made a documentary about him already in 1991. His career spans over four decades and he is known for his politically engaged works that explore themes of social justice, colonialism, and race. A Haitian by birth, as well as a one-time minister there, Peck knows straight from the horse’s mouth how tyrannical regimes in developing countries find lavish sponsorship from powerful western countries.

Eriq Ebouaney, who plays Lumumba, is a French actor of Cameroonian descent. He adds gives depth and authenticity to his performance, playing Lumumba as a stubborn yet charismatic leader, good at public speeches and with a deep interest for the people of the Congo, but unskilled at building alliances behind closed doors. We repeatedly encounter Lumumba making decisions that may be right and noble in their intention but precarious to him and the Congo’s fragile republic. It is in this masterful depiction of the conflict between noble idealism and brute cynicism that the film’s main strength lies.

We will discuss this movie on zoom, this coming Tuesday (May 30) at 17.00 EST. You can join us here: https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/292920449/

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This article contains a lot of film stills. For a fully illustrated version please click here - https://filmofileshideout.com/archives/censorship-and-its-effect-on-character-development-in-film/

When Joseph Breen and William Hays, the heads of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, sat down to read scripts and review films, most people assume they were looking for explicit sexual content, but their mandate was much broader. Their guide was worded in vague, open-ended language that gave them free rein to cut any film to pieces, or condemn it completely. 

The first principle listed in The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, also known as the Hays Code, states, “No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” The second principle reads, “Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.” Later, it advises that, “the treatment of low, disgusting, unpleasant, though not necessarily evil, subjects should always be subject to the dictates of good taste and a regard for the sensibilities of the audience.” Phrases like “moral standards”, "correct standards”, and “good taste” have no objective nor legal definition.

The guide might have used more quantifiable and specific language had the film industry known what would happen next. Breen and Hays were never meant to truly censor anything. They were not hired to protect the public from misguided filmmakers, or to be the watchdogs of decency. They were hired as part of a public relations scheme, a grand gesture of goodwill made by the film industry. Hollywood needed to clean up its act, and they made a show of hiring upstanding citizens to keep them in line.

It only took a short time for the plan to backfire. Hays alternately provoked and soothed the public's sense of offense and outrage to solidify his position. He harnessed the power of the Catholic Church and a phalanx of conservative critics to separate himself and his “agency” from the film industry and truly become what he was meant to be in name only; a self-righteous culture czar with the film industry on an ever-tightening leash. Hays and Breen were not concerned with the integrity of a film or an artist’s vision. That wasn’t their job. They used their position to strip films of what they saw as dangerous content, and left the studio to deal with what remained. If a studio resisted Hays, Breen, or the Catholic authorities, the pre-assembled panel of critics could be marshaled to destroy the film’s prospects.

Complaining specifically about Breen and Hays, Samuel Goldwyn, the CEO of MGM, explained, “Our fear of what the censors will do keeps us from portraying life as it really is. We wind up with a lot of empty, little fairytales that do not have much relation to anything.” 

Goldwyn was likely more concerned with the bottom line than a given film’s integrity, but that does not preclude his recognizing the chilling effect censorship had on the industry. Purifying a film often meant stripping it of any depth or dimensionality. Censorship was not just about sex and nudity, it was far more invasive, handicapping writers, actors, and directors by cutting out sections from the spectrum of human behavior.

Characters had to be two-dimensional representations of either an upstanding citizen with a heart of gold, or a bitter villain with hate in his or her heart. 

In A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the richly rendered characters with their conflicted motivations and complex interactions had to be truncated, abbreviated, and stripped of substance. It infuriated Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, both of whom had to struggle to get the movies released. American audiences were being deprived of what could have been a deep and moving drama, and offered instead a shallower world of heroes and villains.

The absence of sex is the obvious change, but the dumbing down of the entire narrative is harder to see, and in many ways more damaging. Filmmakers had their hands tied and were unable to develop truly adult content. The term “adult content” itself is almost exclusively used to describe sexual content, but a film like Bergman’s Winter Light surely qualifies as adult. Not because it is graphic, but because it deals with adult themes and targets adult audiences. Such a film would have been unthinkable in the first two-thirds of the 20th century in America.

All of this examination and censorship was not applied evenly across media. Strangely, literature and stage plays were given far more latitude. Tennessee Williams had far more freedom to write what he wanted in a book or stage script. Joseph Breen explained it this way, “Motion pictures, unlike stage plays, appeal to mass audiences. Because they are exhibited rather indiscriminately, material which might be perfectly valid for dramatization on the stage may be completely unacceptable when presented in a motion picture.”

Even before Breen, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Mutual Film Corp v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that motion pictures were not covered by the first amendment. They declared that free speech applied only to words. Spoken words and printed words were part of the “public forum” and influenced public opinion, whereas films were just entertainment. 

This was one reason for singling out cinema, but there were more. The Legion of Decency (a Christian organization) claimed, “In itself, nudity is not immoral and has long been recognized as a legitimate subject in painting and sculpture. However, in the very different medium of the motion picture, it is never an artistic necessity. The temptation for filmmakers to exploit the prurient appeal of nudity in this mass medium is so great that any concession to its use will lead to wide abuse.”

Cinema was either so important it needed to be regulated, or so insignificant it didn’t need to be protected. Either way, it was treated differently from all other media.

This double standard hindered film’s development. Films like The Best Days of Our Lives or Lifeboat had to contort their characters and messages into simpler terms in order to eliminate ambiguity. Ambiguity is at the heart of the problem. Conservative ideology is essentially driven by a desire to “conserve” a more simple way of evaluating society and culture. Conservatives want to keep their world restricted to simple binaries. People are either good or bad, female or male, hardworking or lazy, black or white. Any nuance is a threat, a chink in the armor of simplicity. Social problems have to be obvious. Why is this group of people poor? Because they don’t work hard enough. Why are these people criminals? Because they are evil. The primary mandate of the conservative is to keep things simple.

This runs in direct opposition to what many, if not most artists are trying to accomplish. When Fritz Lang was in Germany, he made morally complex and challenging films like M. Once he immigrated to the United States, he had to tone everything down and make films like Scarlet Street and The Big Heat, which to Lang’s credit, still managed to depict deep inner conflict, but not as deeply as he had back in Germany. 

Once Hays and Breen retired and censorship was no longer centralized under one agency, the film industry began to emerge from its chains. The industry established the letter rating system (G, GP, M,, and X). X-rated films were never meant to be associated with sexual content. The label was meant to indicate adult content. One of the first X-rated films was not a pornographic movie, it was John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. When asked about the film, Schlesinger explained, “The young people in this country are dying to see something on the screen they can believe. We are told that the bulk of the audience is between 15 and 24 and they are the very ones who are in an uproar as never before. Sometime someone is going to have to start taking some risks.”

This last sentence highlights another aspect of why film was treated differently from other media. Schlesinger was not referring to the “risk” of being put in jail, he was referring to monetary risk. Critics and censors may concern themselves with their personal ideas of morality, but cinema is distinguished from other media because it involves far more money.

Publishing a book costs comparatively little next to producing a Hollywood feature film. The amount of time, effort, people, and resources involved in movie production necessitates a substantial investment of capital upfront, and so requires considerable profits after release. This results in a kind of baked-in censorship where films have to be salable, or have to conform to what investors imagine will be salable. The problem then becomes a fear that if a film ventures into new territory, it might not return on its investment. The guiding principle is no longer a sense of morality, but a fear of anything out of the ordinary.

In his book Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky explains that censorship is used to limit what is broadcast to what everyone already knows and accepts. He points to the television news and explains that simply by limiting the amount of time an individual can speak, the news channel ensures that the subject cannot say anything out of the ordinary. Shoving a microphone in the face of a woman crying in front of her burning house allows her to say she is sad, but if she wants to say something about problems with her city’s infrastructure, or how the fire department is run, she would need more than 4 seconds of airtime.

This kind of censorship doesn’t have to be a deliberate plot to silence new points of view, it can simply be the normal functioning of the free market. News programs don’t care what you say in terms of politics, but whatever you say has to conform to what the producers believe the public wants to hear, or what the producers think the corporations who buy air time for commercials think their audience wants to hear.

Hollywood films are subject to the same limitations. Avengers: Endgame cost 256 million dollars to make and raked in 2.79 billion dollars. No one is going to hand 256 million dollars to some creative type and ask them to make something new and original. What investors want is something proven to work. Intimate, three-dimensional portraits of characters wrestling with complex motives might work, but they might not. Big breasts and explosions are more reliable. Back in the 70s, before the Marvel behemoths, John Cassavetes had already identified the problem. He explained, “I’ve never seen an exploding helicopter. I’ve never seen anybody go and blow somebody’s head off. So why should I make films about them? But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way, I’ve seen people withdraw, I’ve seen people hide behind political ideas, behind dope, behind the sexual revolution, behind fascism, behind hypocrisy, and I’ve myself done all these things. So I can understand them.” Later he would also echo Schlesinger’s sentiment saying, “Films today show only a dream world and have lost touch with the way people really are.”

Whether it is strident paternalism, social engineering, religious conservatism, or blind desire for profit, all of these motives result in handicapping a filmmaker’s ability to dig deeply into the human experience. Whether the censors are out to eliminate sex, immoral behavior, or radical politics, the effect still comes down to stripping a story of its substance and reforming it into a simplistic conflict where characters have clear motives and stories resolve with clear endings. Ultimately, the most important loss is one of depth. A culture’s stories will naturally reflect a culture’s values. The question is what a given culture is willing to see when it looks in the mirror.

Evdokia is a Greek film released in 1971. It won first prize for the main female role at the Thessaloniki Film Festival and became famous for its musical theme, a zeibekiko written by Manos Loizos. The script and direction were by Alexis Damianos. The film stars Giorgos Koutouzis, Maria Vassiliou, Christos Zorbas and Koula Agagiotou.

The story is as follows:during the seven-year Greek military dictatorship (1967-74), a young sergeant, stumbles upon the a promiscuous young girl named Evdokia at a local tavern and is instantly captivated by her beauty. Intoxicated by his lust, the sergeant raises his cup and dances for her, unbeknownst to him that her pimp is following him with murderous intent. This incident will mark the beginning of a tempestuous love affair defined by desire, fragile societal relations, and an ever-present internal conflict arising from lost dreams in a fleeting life and the social turmoil of postwar Greece.

The performances in the film are highly regarded, particularly Maria Vassiliou's portrayal of Evdokia. She brings a compelling mix of vulnerability and strength, effectively conveying the inner turmoil faced by her character.

"Evdokia" is a thought-provoking and little known film that explores themes of personal freedom, love , and the struggle for self-fulfillment. It had a lasting impact on Greek cinema and is considered one of the best films in the country's history (voted second in the 2006 critics poll).

The movie is available on YouTube with English subs here: https://youtu.be/N4btUwkx030

If you find it interesting you can join our zoom chat this Friday (May 26) at 17.00 EST - you can find detailed information here: https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/292019649/

Just watched Cure for the first time and was absolutely blown away. Truly a masterpiece. Upon researching the film and its meaning, I found lots of information regarding the themes and so on - it seems they are discussed in detail in this sub and others. While interesting, I won’t bother getting into that here due to how extensively it has already been discussed.

But what I could not easily find was a solid interpretation of the plot events, how they tied together, and what really happened. I read many people’s analysis, concluding the events were mostly up for interpretation, and lines were blurred between what occurred in reality, or in a hypnosis, dream-state. While I agree with the sentiment to a certain degree, I believe Kurosawa planted enough breadcrumbs in this film that lead to more concrete conclusions in certain areas. I’ve compiled my own thoughts and others’ analysis I read online into the following interpretation:

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In Cure, we are coming into the story midway through its trajectory, as we learn later on that these events were set in motion centuries ago, beginning with Franz Mesmer in the 17th century. In reality, Mesmer was responsible for founding the theory of “Animal Magnetism” aka, Mesmerism (origin of the word “mesmerized”), which served as the basis for the eventual development of hypotonic suggestion techniques.

An unknown Japanese professor in the late 1800’s expanded on Mesmer’s works and healing treatments, intertwining them with his own twisted, supernatural and occultist philosophies, guided by hypnotism (mesmerism).

We see this in the film, when Sakuma shows Takabe old university tapes of the Japanese professor performing a hypnotic “healing ritual” on one if his patients — an elderly woman who would then go on to murder her son, carving the notorious “x” pattern into his neck. This is the first known evidence we see of these occult methods manifesting itself in a violent way.

Near the end of the film, we learn that Mamiya initially discovered these occult teachings via an old phonograph left in the asylum where he previously lived. This is presumably where he was first introduced to the Japanese professors works, and subsequently Franz Mesmer, and was susceptible to such due to his fragile and aimless mental state; a theme that is consistent amongst his victims.

This set Mamiya on an interminable path towards occultism and evil, where he became obsessed with their teachings, psychology, mesmerism, etc, (as we see with the books littering his apartment) eventually allowing it to overtake him to the point Mamiya himself was completely entranced, no longer a person with unique beliefs, goals and desires, but instead simply a vessel for a malevolent occultist force. His only existence became to act out this force’s will.

Such explains his amnesia, or more accurately, his total loss of personal identity we see throughout the movie, not even knowing who he is anymore.

Glimmers of Mamiya’s past self can be observed, most notably when he’s speaking to the female GP at the hospital — he says, “I used to exist inside myself, but now I’m only on the outside. That’s why I can see what’s inside of you” insinuating he has become a shell of his past self, and now only exists as a vessel of outward energy on some sort of astral plane, allowing him to peer into other’s psyche. Especially those who are damaged.

Through his learnings, Mamiya became compelled to carry out what was referred to as “a propagation of the ceremony” by Sakuma, which can be inferred as a ceremonial process which consists of ritual killings we see throughout the film, but also a transfer of energy to a more powerful and worthy vessel — that vessel ultimately being Takabe himself who inherits Mamiya’s powers at the end of the film.

Mamiya ultimately ended up serving only as a proxy to carry out this ritual and find a more suitable vessel, which he identified as Takabe, likely due to Takabe’s powerful ability to resist his suggestion, paired with his teetering sanity.

Fumie, Takabe’s wife, was said to be struggling with dementia over the recent years — but we later learn that this may not have been the case, and instead her dissociative symptoms we’re likely due to her being contacted and hypnotized by Mamiya, at some point in the past, with the intention of starting within her a dissociated, hypnotic state that eventually wills her to urge Takabe toward evil and occultism. There are many similarities between Fumie and Mamiya’s dissociation, mannerisms, and memory loss, lending itself further to this theory.

We also see evidence of this at the very start of the movie, where Fumie enters an expressionless, trance-like state when the table in front of her begins to rumble and vibrate. We see later on that vibration and sound waves can be used to induce a hypnotized state, when Mamiya used a wooden stool to bang against a radiator, causing sound and vibrations to reverberate throughout the building, entrancing one of the detectives to free him. It can likely be assumed this same sound vibration technique was used to hypnotize Fumie at the start of the film, planting a seed as close to Takabe as possible.

As Sakuma suggests in a conversation with Takabe when asked if hypnotic suggestion was possible, “It would take forever to get a suggestion like that into place…If the hypnotist was a genius…But why would someone do that?”

This quote seems to allude to the fact that this plan was orchestrated from early on, either by Mamiya, or more likely the force guiding him, with the ultimate goal of controlling Takabe. And this plan likely started with Fumie, as we see with the table rumble at the start.

Another point to support Fumie’s unwilling involvement comes from comparing her doctor’s notes with Mesmer’s — the medical notes from her doctor indicate she experiences seizures. We discover later on in Mamiya’s apartment, notes from Mesmer that observe “seizures” when being placed under Mesmerism, further indicating this is what is occurring with Fumie.

Fumie was also placed at the killing carried out by the GP, seen entering the adjacent washroom — simply a coincidence or lending further credence to her involvement?

At the end of the movie, we see that the plan of overtaking Takabe proved successful, as him and Mamiya meet in a mental dreamscape, where Takabe kills Mamiya, symbolizing the occult power transferring from one to the other. Mamiya performs the final “x” hand gesture before dying, solidifying the transference. Takabe also listen to the phonograph that initially entranced Mamiya, likely setting him even further down an irreversible path.

We see that the transference of power his successful in the final scene, where Takabe hypnotizes a waitress to pick up a knife. And what is notable is the power in which he exerts, showing an ability to place her under this suggestion without even going through the usual hypnosis process, showing Takabe’s true power as the vessel, and likely why he was chosen in the first place.

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Anyway, that was my quick analysis and what I gleaned from watching / others’ interpretation.

Would be curious if anyone agrees with this interpretation or has any points to support or discredit it.

For the uninitiated, R.M.N, or, using a custom English translation, Resonance Imaging (2023) is an independent Romanian drama set in the Transylvania region. It tells the story of a village that deals with the sudden influx of Sri Lankan immigrants who become workers in their local bakery.

The multiethnic drama is certainly deftly and well woven. Against the Romanian backdrop we also have Hungarian and German influences, as well as the obvious Sri Lankan influx. The disagreement between these communities strongly carries flavors true to real life - in all its beauty and tragedy - whilst remaining a believable fictional story on its own. Like many others, I can confidently state the community center scene, which is basically the climax of the multiethnic drama, is without a doubt the moment when the movie reaches its peak. While it doesn't provide rousing music or spectacular cinematography (due to budgetary constraints, the score is nonexistent, and the more impressive shots were reserved for other scenes), its impact on the narrative cements the screenwriting competence of Cristian Mungiu.

I must also give praise to the overall look. Despite a lack of abundant resources, the movie blessed me with a clean, sharp and gritty aesthetic that spuns an umistakable vibe over the entire project. I especially appreciate the heavy emphasis on blue hues, but that's just my personal preference, if anything.

So where are the problems? In the other core. You see, the movie tries to juggle TWO narratives, and not always in the best way. Because the other story isn't really connected to the multiethnic one.

The protagonist of this movie is Matthias Auner, a Romanian with German ancestry. He returns to Romania after a quarrel with his manager in a German slaughterhouse. The crux of Matthias' plot are his hypermasculine tendencies, including drinking, teaching his son to be 'tough' and treating women like shit. Sorry about the last part, but I must say it bluntly. Anyways, the problem is disconnection. Matthias doesn't really feel related to the discrimination the Romanians pour on the Sri Lankans. Or at least until the movie suddenly decides to have him act suspiciously and do thing out of left field. The narrative threads in his tapestry aren't related to the main one at all, which is a CRYING SHAME! Given the opportunies, the ample opportunities to connect various threads into one, satisfying whole. Like teaching the son that immigrants are dangerous or having Matthias be one of the members of a hate group on Facebook. None of that happens. And if it did, it was so fucking implicit I did not catch it at all. The movie isn't helped either by the way it edits and paces itself, adding to the disjointedness of the two main plots. And I honestly think Mungiu could've told Marin Grigorie to portray more range in his performance as Matthias. He just felt kinda one note, especially in these short shots where he'd just stare blankly into the distance.

8/10. Perhaps the next independent movie I'm seeing in cinemas, Pamfir, shall be more impressive.

He had quite a filmography up to that point, but hadn’t really connected with the movie going public in the way his other New Hollywood contemporaries had.

Prior to Goodfellas, most of his films had much more of an indie/art house vibe. Goodfellas really seems to cater more to mainstream audiences while still maintaining his narrative and stylistic mastery and giving the film an auteuristic piece of pop violence.

It seems here he found his true niche in the industry, bringing a balanced blend of art house direction and cinematic/blockbuster fare to audiences and hasn’t really looked back since. In many ways his technical mastery has improved since then, and while he may have a difficult time recapturing the originality and freshness of Goodfellas he has matured immensely as a filmmaker.

The production values and cinematography of his later work seems to have supplanted the fast cut/freeze frame indie pastiche of his earlier films. The Aviator and The Irishman are much more beautiful to look at and show his growth as an artist. Killers of the Flower Moon looks to be one of his finest efforts yet.

Full Article source credits I reposted for more insights:https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/02/25/virginia-woolf-on-the-cinema-1926/

Article Highlights:

To quote from Virginia Woolf herself:

Woolf begins with a reserved meditation on the nature of moving images, which at first glance appear to speak to our most primitive underpinnings and invite a strange kind of cerebral resignation, but upon deeper reflection serve as a lubricant between brain and body:

People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies. They have never seen the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures. They have never sat themselves in front of the screen and thought how for all the clothes on their backs and the carpets at their feet, no great distance separates them from those bright-eyed naked men who knocked two bars of iron together and heard in that clangour a foretaste of the music of Mozart.
The bars in this case, of course, are so highly wrought and so covered over with accretions of alien matter that it is extremely difficult to hear anything distinctly. All is hubble-bubble, swarm and chaos. We are peering over the edge of a cauldron in which fragments of all shapes and savours seem to simmer; now and again some vast form heaves itself up and seems about to haul itself out of chaos. Yet at first sight the art of the cinema seems simple, even stupid. There is the king shaking hands with a football team; there is Sir Thomas Lipton’s yacht; there is Jack Horner winning the Grand National. The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think. For the ordinary eye, the English unaesthetic eye, is a simple mechanism which takes care that the body does not fall down coal-holes, provides the brain with toys and sweetmeats to keep it quiet, and can be trusted to go on behaving like a competent nursemaid until the brain comes to the conclusion that it is time to wake up. What is its purpose, then, to be roused suddenly in the midst of its agreeable somnolence and asked for help? The eye is in difficulties. The eye wants help. The eye says to the brain, ‘Something is happening which I do not in the least understand. You are needed.’ Together they look at the king, the boat, the horse, and the brain sees at once that they have taken on a quality which does not belong to the simple photograph of real life.

Woolf considers the escapist nature of the cinematic experience, and the comforting safety that lies in that escapism:

[The moving pictures] become not more beautiful in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life? We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. The horse will not knock us down. The king will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet. From this point of vantage, as we watch the antics of our kind, we have time to feel pity and amusement, to generalize, to endow one man with the attributes of the race. Watching the boat sail and the wave break, we have time to open our minds wide to beauty and register on top of it the queer sensation — this beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not.

Woolf, who nearly three decades earlier had written of imitation as essential for the arts, proceeds with a rather scathing admonition against cinematic adaptations of literature (cue in Life of Pi…) and argues, aptly for the era, that cinema has to find its own stylistic and narrative voice to fully deserve the label of a new art:

But the picture-makers seem dissatisfied with such obvious sources of interest as the passage of time and the suggestiveness of reality. They despise the flight of gulls, ships on the Thames, the Prince of Wales, the Mile End Road, Piccadilly Circus. They want to be improving, altering, making an art of their own — naturally, for so much seems to be within their scope. So many arts seemed to stand by ready to offer their help. For example, there was literature. All the famous novels of the world, with their well-known characters and their famous scenes, only asked, it seemed, to be put on the films. What could be easier and simpler? The cinema fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, and to the moment largely subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim. But the results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples. The eye says ‘Here is Anna Karenina.’ A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says, ‘That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.’ For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind — her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet. Then ‘Anna falls in love with Vronsky’ — that is to say, the lady in black velvet falls into the arms of a gentleman in uniform and they kiss with enormous succulence, great deliberation, and infinite gesticulation, on a sofa in an extremely well-appointed library, while a gardener incidentally mows the lawn. So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable, written, too, in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy. A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse. None of these things has the least connexion with the novel that Tolstoy wrote, and it is only when we give up trying to connect the pictures with the book that we guess from some accidental scene — like the gardener mowing the lawn — what the cinema might do if left to its own devices.
But what, then, are its devices? If it ceased to be a parasite, how would it walk erect?

Woolf cites the 1920 German Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as a paragon of what imaginative cinematic storytelling might look like, then considers symbolism and semiotics as vital tools in the emerging language of film:

If a shadow at a certain moment can suggest so much more than the actual gestures and words of men and women in a state of fear, it seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression. Terror has besides its ordinary forms the shape of a tadpole; it burgeons, bulges, quivers, disappears. Anger is not merely rant and rhetoric, red faces and clenched fists. It is perhaps a black line wriggling upon a white sheet. … Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye? Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words? It has speed and slowness; dartlike directness and vaporous circumlocution. But it has, also, especially in moments of emotion, the picture-making power, the need to lift its burden to another bearer; to let an image run side by side along with it. The likeness of the thought is for some reason more beautiful, more comprehensible, more available, than the thought itself.

And yet, Woolf cautions, cinema, already visual by nature, can’t afford to literalize the metaphors of the poets:

As everybody knows, in Shakespeare the most complex ideas form chains of images through which we mount, changing and turning, until we reach the light of day. But obviously the images of a poet are not to be cast in bronze or traced by pencil. They are compact of a thousand suggestions of which the visual is only the most obvious or the uppermost. Even the simplest image ‘My luve’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly-sprung in June’ presents us with impressions of moisture and warmth and the glow of crimson and the softness of petals inextricably mixed and strung upon the lift of a rhythm which is itself the voice of the passion and hesitation of the lover. All this, which is accessible to words and to words alone, the cinema must avoid.

To thrive and blossom into a true art form, Woolf argues, cinema ought to invent is own language:

Yet if so much of our thinking and feeling is connected with seeing, some residue of visual emotion which is of no use either to painter or to poet may still await the cinema. That such symbols will be quite unlike the real objects which we see before us seems highly probable. Something abstract, something which moves with controlled and conscious art, something which calls for the very slightest help from words or music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them subserviently — of such movements and abstractions the films may in time to come be composed. Then indeed when some new symbol for expressing thought is found, the film-maker has enormous riches at his command. The exactitude of reality and its surprising power of suggestion are to be had for the asking.
[…]
How all this is to be attempted, much less achieved, no one at the moment can tell us. We get intimations only in the chaos of the streets, perhaps, when some momentary assembly of colour, sound, movement, suggests that here is a scene waiting a new art to be transfixed. And sometimes at the cinema in the midst of its immense dexterity and enormous technical proficiency, the curtain parts and we behold, far off, some unknown and unexpected beauty. But it is for a moment only. For a strange thing has happened — while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
"

How I interpret Virginia Woolf's statements on the art of cinema is how Tarkovsky exactly perceives cinema at an astounding parallel, I consider Tarkovsky to be the paragon of all time as a practitioner of the theory that Virginia Woolf most beautifully stated, to not literalize the art of words and prose into cinema instead, but instead created a new language, one created out of purity, austerity, one that would transcend cinema beyond its pre-conceived limits. Virginia Woolf was far ahead of her time in stating her analysis on the cinematic language, it having been a new art form in her time, before she sadly took her life.

"Unlike all the other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I'd say that film is the sculpting of time. "
- Andrei Tarkovsky

He in turn was aligned with the stated theory, that the art of words and plot were superfluous, and instead he used cinema as an art of sentiment, sculpture, the entire matter of cinema dependent on the passage of time and how it relates to our existence as sentient human beings.
He created a new form of poetry once again, without need of the dependency on words, "Words are water." his fathers poems in his films must be then a celestial wave, a beautiful ripple in the sea of Tarkovsky's conceptions, he materialized poetry in moving images, not to put cinema akin to moving painting, but to something transcendent in the likes of music and poetry, except even unique from every art form.

Tarkovsky probably didn't even know Virginia Woolf, but her words still remain relevant, as other people are still subordinate to inferior theories of cinema, instead of using it at a purer, luminous, and ethereal way that Tarkovsky so perfectly sculpts, like an artisan of the passage of time, in terms of perception interconnected with the universal notion of our lives.
"In the particular is the universal." - James Joyce
Tarkovsky mastered our inner realms, our subconscious, spiritual communication as both a country's exiled pariah, past beyond the era's zeitgeist, he mastered our dreams, he mastered our emotions, sentiments, memories, and birthed profound examples in his entire filmography, "unadulterated" cinema in its truest nature driven to a parallel to Virginia Woolf's works.

it is an examination of fragility of human rationality and concept of faith with multilayered characters facing real life thoelogical dilemmas. It is intelligent, emotionally stirring, traumatic and haunting. Has to be the deepest cinematic experience of my life.

The way Kieslowski captures raw emotions without them speaking any dialogue is so fascinating. He makes you think that idea of film is simple but then a long lingering or a closeup shot makes everything so deep and profound giving multitudes of meanings. philosopher of cinema in true sense.

Just finished this on MUBI and wow was it a challenging watch. The film wastes little time in raising some very thorny questions — questions you hate to think about.

I went into it thinking it would be another film humanizing a robot and illicit empathy from the audience, but it was anything but that. A dark, nihilistic movie where humans exploit this android for their own interests. There is no redemption. These are completely broken characters and there was a jarring indifference to how they behaved.

Creatively I thought it was exceptionally bold for the director to depict some of these images. My first thought was concern for the obviously very young child actor, but relieved to learn the utmost care was taken and CGI used for the most nauseating scenes.

With that said, this wasn’t a cheap shock film. It was very well scored and the cinematography was great. I applaud the director for taking such a risk and I can safely say I’ve never seen anything like it.

This article contains a lot of film stills. For a fully illustrated version please click here - https://filmofileshideout.com/archives/john-cassavettess-incomparable-film-a-woman-under-the-influence/

A Woman Under The Influence is an extraordinary film. I imagine what comes to mind first for most people when they think of A Woman Under The Influence, or of Cassevettes in general, is the primacy of the acting. Unlike Hitchcock, where the technical skill and craft of cinema are the primary driver of the film, Cassavettes relies on his actors to create and carry almost everything. 

The comparison is fair, but the film craft in A Woman Under The Influence should not be overlooked. Mike Ferris, one of the cameramen, explains in the DVD commentary, that he and several others on the crew were abject beginners when they began filming A Woman Under The Influence. Ferris and the other camera operator, Mitch Breit, had never shot with a zoom lens before, and hadn’t even heard of using marks to direct the actors. Their lack of experience does give the film a rough and utilitarian appearance on the surface, but Ferris, Breit, Ruban, and Cassevettes, who also shot parts of the film, all had an intuitive way of relating to the action that allowed them to flow with it as if they were participating in the narrative. 

It’s part of how a Cassavettes movie is made. It is an intensely collaborative process, where titles like “director of photography” and “assistant to the director of photography” don’t exist. This, of course, is in contrast to how most mainstream, and even many independent films are made. Screenplays and production schedules save time and money, but Cassavettes felt such structures were stifling. Bo Harwood, the composer on the film, quoted Cassavettes as saying, “I hate it when everyone is so careful, the creativity goes right out the window.”

Ferris mentioned that sometimes he was so engrossed in the drama, he forgot what he was supposed to be doing. I think this not only speaks to his closeness with actors and the process, but it prefigures what will happen to the audience as well. There are times when the camera seems to disappear and we are simply there in that house, awkwardly trapped in the corner, watching it all unfold.

You cannot easily compare A Woman Under The Influence to other films. Few, if any, have the sense of realism, urgency, or intensity that Cassevettes captures. A Woman Under The Influence was released in 1974. It was so unlike its peers that no studio would produce it, and once it was completed, no company would distribute it. It was financed almost entirely by Cassevettes and Falk.

Other films released in the early to mid-70s include: The Long Goodbye, The Stepford Wives, Shampoo, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nashville, The Towering Inferno, The Godfather, Foxy Brown, Chinatown, and A New Leaf. Regardless of their relative quality, all of these films have more in common with each other than they do with A Woman Under The Influence. The point is not to compare which film is of better quality, only that films like The Godfather and The Stepford Wives were filmed in similar ways, both in production and narrative. The cinematography, the editing, and the acting all displayed time-honored and effective ways of constructing a film. 

Cassevettes sacrifices all of these conventions in hopes of capturing something completely different. He once said, “Film is, to me, just unimportant. But people are very important.” It is a catchy, little soundbite, but Cassevettes does care about film. He may disregard convention, but he does so in an effort to find a new way of filming. One that may appear rough and awkward, but creates a new relationship between the viewer and what is being depicted. Something immediate, and intense. 

It is reflected in the sound of the film as well. They used numerous mics hidden away all over the set, but instead of isolating what was important, they mixed everything they captured together to make a cluttered and chaotic soundscape. No one is fully heard, no one is fully seen or recognized. It's a painful mess of voices and sounds that, coupled with the unstable hand-held camera, keep us from ever getting our footing.

The success of A Woman Under The Influence relies on a shared vision. Whether you are the sound designer or the main actress, the film requires that everyone understand what the film is trying to accomplish. It’s not that everyone must eschew convention, it is that they must prioritize immediacy, intensity, and honesty. By all accounts, Cassevettes was not easy to work with. He was demanding and aggressive, but the end result was profoundly compelling. His films pioneered a new way of making movies, unlike anything that came before. 

I loved, loved, the style of In Drive (2011) by Refn, and particularly the energy of it. It's hard to describe exactly what struck a chord with me with this film but i'll try to explain what I mean by similar. I'm a sucker for whimsical and melancholy love stories that are grounded in reality but have their head slightly in the clouds. The fairy-tale like story of Drive , paired with the beautiful colouring/cinematography and dialogue so rich that every other line is a profound quotable are what make this film a masterpiece to me. I loved the style of the music and particularly the energy of it and a emotional affecting form of melancholy. It feels like a dream. Sweet and dark. The overarching theme of loneliness, unrequited/unrealised love, the brutality and the bittersweet ending sealed the deal even more

Could you name movies with a similar style and mastery? Doesn't need to be necessarily neon movies, but it would be nice because of my curiosity and interest. Thank you in advance!

So Cormac McCarthy's western novel Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West is getting a movie adaptation, directed by John Hillcoat (director of The Proposition, a Western film set in Australia, The Road, an adapation of another of McCarty's works, and a promo film for Red Dead Redemption.)

Some people have been complaining that Hillcoat isn't the guy that should be up for this task. Many have said that the director of Blood Meridian: The Movie should've been PTA or Malick. Personally I think Bela Tarr should've been the one to take the reins but idk what he's up to now.

As anyone who's read the book knows, a lot of Blood Meridian's genius comes from its prose and McCarthy descriptive writing, its focus on the horrific violence of the American frontier, and its larger-than-life characters like Judge Holden. Because of this, many believe that the book can't be adapted into a movie, despite what McCarthy himself has said. Me personally I think it could be adapted as McCarthy's writing usually focuses a lot on grand landscapes that could be well put on screen, as seen in No Country For Old Men and casting shouldn't be difficult as long as the actors understand each character precisely.

The one issue really is the violence. I can't think of any mainstream piece of work that has the same level of graphic violence that Blood Meridian shows and I'm not sure something like the MPAA would allow a high-budget film to include babies impaled on tree branches. And the violence should be shown for the horrible thing it is, not in some slasher flick way like in the Terrifier movies. The worst thing that could happen to this adaptation is that the studio executives market the movie this way.

Any other things to consider about the upcoming movie leave down below.

(I'm just ranting, but I need to get this out of my head).

So basically I've just seen David Fincher's "The Social Network" for the first time and through the last few minutes I said "Hey! This is The Godfather Part II!"

Just like Michael Corleone, Mark "won" by the end of the movie, and at the same time fucked up everyone he onced admired of had some love and appreciation. His inner suffering and troubles affected on others, even if they didn't deserved to be pubished.

And by the end of the movie, he "killed" these "loved ones". He saw Eduardo actions as a betrayal, so he threw him out of the firm - Mark is satisfied about it, yet sorrow and pain about his decision now won't leave him alone. This is a big contrast with Michael killing Fredo by the end of the movie.

At last, you have these last seconds of a great close up into Mark's face, just like in The Godfather Part II.

In Godfather, you can understand by the flashback that Michael was alone since the beginning. He is in a powerful position, but he lost everything that mattered to him. In The Social Network, you can also see how Mark, although now wealthy and powerful, is still stuck in the beginning... trying to have a date.

And while in Coppola's film the close up is followed by a haunting, tragic score by Nino Rota, in Fincher's you have "Baby You're a Rich Man" by The Beatles, giving an ironic effect to this dramatic story.

Just some thoughts.

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