Agenda

EN

“The real horror of Fargo is that many of the characters have thoughtlessly bought into the ‘sunny’ veneer of American culture and the empty promise of ‘the American Dream’, but at the same time they seem unable to reconcile those impossible visions of optimism with the persistent troubles that plague their lives –  often caused by their own lack of self-awareness. Jerry Lundegaard is the walking epitome of this pervasive emotional crisis; but we also find glimpses of it even in the most minor characters, such as the cashier at the diner, whose forced smile and false-cheerful attitude threaten to crack wide open at any moment.”

Rodney F. Hill1  

“Fargo, more than any of the Coens’ other work, is a study in contrast, namely in the sense that it’s made by two people who were clearly at one time insiders, but who have now taken the opportunity to see the Midwestern template from the outside. As such, every interaction in the film registers as a direct reflection of incongruous elements and repressed tensions.

The plot itself is a contradiction. It’s on the surface a neo-noir crime drama, but the story isn’t spiked with twists, and the law seems firmly in command of the situation. What’s more, as represented by McDormand’s doughtily pregnant, perpetually parka-covered police detective Marge Gunderson, the law is the film’s most empathetic presence. As she professionally, unhurriedly solves one of cinema’s most open-and-shut cases (Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard commissions two hired hitmen to kidnap his wife and hopes the crime will pry some money out of his boss/father-in-law’s wallet, and is horrified when everything unravels after a routine pullover), she also waddles through a series of seeming non sequiturs, all of which accentuate the relationship between outstate Minnesota and the Twin Cities, between behavior and intuition, between considered silence and chatty idiocy, between ‘Mack-Donalds’ and Crockpot-simmered ‘sup-purr.’ [...]

Do you have to be a Minnesotan to really get Fargo? As the saying goes, you could do a lot worse. But even beyond the regional colloquialisms and the broad accents, which most of us in the Twin Cities are quick to claim are more the province of the outstate crowd, is another smartly constructed, wickedly executed black comedy about the inherent weirdness of people, a satire reflecting how humanity’s grand, inevitably failed gestures (represented here by cinematographer Roger Deakins’s Lawrence of Arabia-pinching opening shots and composer Carter Burwell’s insistently, hilariously ethnic dirges) are no match for mankind’s pettiness and stupidity. In the end, all the righteous bloodshed in the world isn’t even worth a three-cent stamp.”

Eric Henderson2

• 1Rodney F. Hill, “Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996),” Senses of Cinema, March 2017.
• 2Eric Henderson, “Review: Fargo,” Slant Magazine, 21 May 2009.

EN

“Giacomo Abbruzzese’s debut feature is a hazily seductive, frequently dreamlike study of life in the French Foreign Legion, fixated on masculine bodies in synchronized and sometimes violently clashing motion. It is also called Disco Boy. You almost certainly wouldn’t choose that subject, tone and title for a film if you didn’t want viewers’ minds to immediately wander to Beau Travail, Claire Denis’ seminal Foreign Legion cine-ballet, with its climactic solo number set to a thumping Eurodance classic; even if you somehow made that error, you wouldn’t compound it with electro-scored terpsichorean interludes of your own. Choosing homage this direct for a first feature is a brazen move, but notwithstanding its openly derivative qualities, ‘Disco Boy’ doesn’t want for boldness or surprise – Abbruzzese’s hot, fluxional command of sound and image keeps us curious.”

Guy Lodge1

“Any movie about the French Foreign Legion might find itself being compared to Claire Denis’ classic Beau Travail with its ambiguous reverence for men’s bodies; perhaps Abbruzzese has taken something from Denis, but perhaps also from Gaspar Noé or Nicolas Winding Refn in the sense of confrontational spectacle and narcosis. The electronic score by Vitalic AKA Pascal Arbez-Nicolas) throbs in its own incantatory trance and Hélène Louvart’s cinematography is a thing of beauty. It’s quite a trip.”

Peter Bradshaw2

“This is a rain-streaked film of rich, burnished colours, psychedelic night-vision sequences and atmospheric power that takes the unfamiliarity and fight-or-flight danger of strange territory as a cue for heightened, sensorial surrealism. It seems, in the vein of Apocalypse Now (1979), that the minds of soldiers can do little else than become unhinged on their jungle mission. Villages blaze and oil refinery chimneys blare in a vision of multinational greed and environmental decimation.”

Carmen Gray3

• 1Guy Lodge, “‘Disco Boy’ Review: Franz Rogowski Does ‘Beau Travail’ in a Dreamy Legionnaire Odyssey,” Variety, 19 February 2023.
• 2Peter Bradshaw, “Disco Boy review – freaky trip into the heart of imperial darkness,” The Guardian, 20 February 2023.
• 3Carmen Gray, “Disco Boy: a dark vision of mercenary madness in the jungles of Nigeria,” Sight and Sound, 5 March 2023.

EN

“Transcending mere reflections of personal anxiety, however, Kafka’s expressionism is more properly ‘sociological’, focusing on the confounding structures of post-bureaucratic life. The Trial in particular ‘expresses’ not the expressionism familiar from Weimar Caligarism, but the alienating social structures described by Max Weber’s Economy and Society, which envisaged a bureaucratic language so secretive that it becomes impenetrable not merely to laymen but to the bureaucrats’ own superiors, thereby inhibiting centralized control and facilitating the bureaucrats’ corrupted autonomy.

It is thus to Welles’ eternal credit that he is one of the few filmmakers – perhaps the only one – who actually got Kafka right. Welles’ insights into Kafka’s sociology, beginning with his correct interpretation of the arrogant character of Joseph K., often get lost in The Trial’s striking visuality, Welles’ own discouragement of ‘pretentious’ intellectual analysis, and the distraction of Welles’ celebrity. Welles rightly sees K. not as a sheepish victim but as complicit in his own convoluted fate, rendering the film not a stylized victimology (as are so many film adaptations of Kafka) but a study in the individual’s unwitting participation in his own destruction.

[...]

This self-alienated, self-sickening world is very much reflected in Welles’ vision. Placing K. in alternately monumental and claustrophobic sets, Welles shrinks and constricts his hero and, consistent with Kafka’s text, literally nauseates him, as K. repeatedly gasps for air in the bureaucracy’s breathless attics and misplaced offices. As in Kafka, the geography of the bureaucracy is stochastic: the harshly lit spaces in which K. loses himself are at once randomly placed and the predictable arrangements of an irrational, circuitous system. The secretive closet in which a leather-clad sadist whips corrupt officials just happens to be located in K.’s office building – because it was K. who lodged the complaint against them.

[...]

Welles’ two key moments of wordplay, not in Kafka, are revealing. In the first, K., momentarily confused by the thugs’ doubletalk, says ‘pornograph’ instead of phonograph, foreshadowing the primitive lasciviousness K. discovers among mid-level officials who kidnap young girls and judges who secret erotic photos in the leaves of law books. In the second instance, K. debates the bumbling agents’ use of the term ‘ovular’ (as opposed to “oval”), which K. insists is not an actual word. On the apparent level, K.’s argument with the thugs is a linguistic farce that reveals the bureaucracy’s reduction of language to Ionescoan nonsense, unconnected to reality.”

Andrew Grossman1

“An individual sitting in a seat, in a hall. Multiply him by quite a few millions and what do you get more than the same spectator in the plural? Unconscious of his statistical importance his dreams depend obstinately on the old human scale. No super-screen will make him a superman. He is no giant, he is only numerous.

But already he is less than this; he gets smaller every day.

Who can say that it’s an accident that the public is dwindling away as the importance of the artist is destroyed? Are giant screens a symptom or a cause?

Let us joyfully admit that there will always be a place for the circus. But let us also insist that room will always be found for whatever clowning may be foisted on us. What perverse, morbid desire delivers our world cinema to an era of nickelodeons?”

Orson Welles2

• 1Andrew Grossman, “Orson Welles’ The Trial Is a Study in Transcendental Sociology,” PopMatters, 2013.
• 2Orson Welles, “Ribbon of Dreams,” Sabzian, 1958 (2015).

EN

Erland: Who are you, really?
Gertrud: I am many things.

“Let’s take the risk of plunging into film without asking permission. Let’s invent our own standards and trust only in spontaneous criticism, which does exist. There are quite a few of us who believe in nothing else. Quite a few of us see the names Carl Theodor Dreyer or Jean-Marie Straub on a poster or a flyer and go to see their films. They are filmmakers whose films the professional critics forbid us to see. That alone is reason enough to go and see them.

In 1964 one of the great film masterpieces, Dreyer’s Gertrud, was killed and buried by the critics (it played in Paris for one week). Who was responsible? You, who believed the critics. Too late.”

Marguerite Duras1

“At once the telling of a dream and a session of analysis (an analysis in which the roles are unceasingly changing; subjected to the flow, the regular tide of the long takes, the mesmeric passes of the incessant camera movements, the even monotone of the voices, the steadiness of the eyes – always turned aside, often parallel, towards us: a little above us – the strained immobility of the bodies, huddled in armchairs, on sofas behind which the other silently stands, fixed in ritual attitudes which make them no more than corridors for speech to pass through, gliding through a semi-obscurity arbitrarily punctuated with luminous zones into which the somnambulists emerge of their own accord...).”

Jacques Rivette2

“Seeing again Gertrud today, or quite simply seeing it as if no one had ever seen it before, amounts to a shock. Dreyer is one of the giants of cinema. In 1964, this theatre play filmed in black and white, with its antiquated theme (Love with a capital L), its unknown, straight-laced Danish actors, looked like some quaintly old-fashioned and half-witted classic lost among the spruce new-wavery of modern cinema. Only his admirers perceived once more Dreyer’s terrifying modernity, the logical progression of forty years of cinema spent probing the bottomlessness of love, and the false bottoms of the scenographic cube, employing white as torture, and music (or else tears) as what arises when words are no longer enough. And today, at a point when this modernity is apparent to everyone, the film is still ahead of its time. (...) The most beautiful grey-scale photography in the history of cinema lays out endless layers of light like clouds of time, and since everything is irremediable, nothing looms through them.”

Serge Daney3

“Gertrud is the invention of a man, the invention of two men: the film was made after a play by Hjalmar Söderberg. Gertrud is a statue, a monument, like many women in Dreyer’s films. Her demands are as absolute as the contours of the film, its spaces and the gestures of its characters are hard and angular. Her demands are too idealistic, which is how you recognise the detour via the men. But occasionally you hear the long dresses rustle, a certain intimacy setting in. And then she goes to Paris to study with Charcot, Freud’s teacher. This real name in a fictional context forces a breakthrough comparable to that of the nature image in Michael. The long-valid order now cracks. With reality, another dimension emerges.”

Friede Grafe4

“In Gertrud (1964), his very last film, Dreyer uses frame compositions to situate characters near sculptures that express or inform on their state of mind – in the scenes in the park, for instance, Gertrud and her young lover are in the vicinity of a copy of the Medici Venus. In addition, the stasis and long-take aesthetics of Dreyer’s later works are worked into a series of tableaux vivants that give the characters a statuary presence. His films play on a certain monumentality of the human figure, that is fixed. In so doing, the characters in Gertrud can be compared with the sculptures that Dreyer filmed for Thorvaldsen (1949).”

Steven Jacobs5

• 1Marguerite Duras, « Othon: Jean-Marie Straub, » In: Outside: Selected Writings (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 155-157. Originally published in Politique-Hébdo on January 14, 1971. Translation: Art Goldhammer.
• 2Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre and Jacques Rivette, “Montage,” In: Jacques Rivette: Texts and Interviews (London: BFI, 1977). Originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, nr. 210, March 1969. Translated by Tom Milne.
• 3Serge Daney, “Gertrud,” Serge Daney in English, November 14, 2020. Originally published in Libération on October 12, 1983.
• 4Frieda Grafe, “Carl Theodor Dreyer. Spiritual Gentlemen and Natural Ladies,” Sabzian, May 24, 2023. Translated by Sis Matthé. Originally published as “Carl Theodor Dreyer. Geistliche Herren und natürliche Damen” in Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 9-10, 1974.
• 5Steven Jacobs, “Carving Cameras on Thorvaldsen and Rodin: Mid-Twentieth Century Documentaries on Sculpture,” In: Steven Jacobs, Susan Felleman, Vito Adriaensens and Lisa Colpaert (eds.), Screening Statues: Sculpture in Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 65-83.

EN

“But perhaps a term like ‘transgression,’ defined as the breaking of rules or exceeding of boundaries does not completely cover the overtones. Most theories of transgressions argue that rule and transgression in practice are strongly complicit, in the sense that transgressions do not so much seek to abolish the rule as to temporarily suspend it, and that rules already inscribe their violation (Jenks, 2003). To only speak about Mariën’s work in terms of transgression, seems then to be missing the point and neglect the light, often pun-like humor which disarms the violence inflicted by transgression. As we saw, Mariën seems more interested in moving between two terms, or following a side-track, than with the actual crossing of boundaries.

[...]

lndeed, humor operates as a device to de-route the binary confrontation of rule/ taboo and transgression. It traces an altogether line, a line of flight, which is more affirmation than negation. Where transgression ohen operates against the public by scandalizing or repulsing it, humor only succeeds by grace of an audience.”

Mieke Bleyen1

Today, Easter of this holy Year,
Here, in the basilica of Notre-Dame in Paris,
I accuse the Universal Catholic Church of the mortal hijacking of our living energies to the profit of an empty heaven;
I accuse the Catholic Church of piracy;
I accuse the Catholic Church of having infected the world with its mortuary morality,
of being the canker sore on this decomposed western civilization.
Verily I say unto thee; God is dead.
We puke up the agonizing insipidness of your prayers,
because your prayers have so generously manured the battlefields of our Europe.
Go forth into the tragic and exultant desert of this land where God is dead,
and run your naked hands through the earth again,
your proud hands,
your hands free of prayer.
Today, Easter of this holy Year,
Here, in the basilica of Notre-Dame in Paris,
we proclaim the death of the Christ-God in order
that Man might live at last.

Marcel Mariën2

• 1Mieke Bleyen, Minor Photography. Connecting Deleuze and Guattari to Photography Theory (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), 58.
• 2 Address from Notre-Dame by Marcel Marien, delivered by Serge Berna and Michel Mourre Paris, April 9 1950.

EN

“This was really a fantasy, as was Porgy and Bess (1959). The all-black world shown in these films doesn’t exist, at least not in the United States. We used the musical-fantasy quality to convey 'something of the needs and aspirations of colored people.”

Otto Preminger1

“Despite itself, Carmen Jones is one of the most important all-Negro movies Hollywood has yet produced. [...] This is an opera having nothing to do with the present day, hence, nothing, really, to do with Negroes. [...] The script failed to require the services of any white people. This seals the action off, as it were, in a vacuum in which the spectacle of color is divested of its danger. The color itself then becomes a kind of vacuum which each spectator will fill with his own fantasies. [...] The characters could easily have been dreamed up by someone determined to prove that Negroes are as “clean” and as “modern” as white people and, I suppose, in one way or another, that is exactly how they were dreamed up.”

James Baldwin2

• 1Otto Preminger cited in Gerald Pratley, The Cinema of Otto Preminger (London: Zwemmer, 1969).
• 2James Baldwin, “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough,” Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 47-58./fn]

EN

“Mr. Tsai is the most Euclidean of directors, a master of geometry whose films are both oblique and acute. He captures some of the essential texures of contemporary urban life -- the loneliness and boredom, the longing that permeates even the most routine encounters, the collisions and coincidences -- with a deadpan dexterity that may remind you of Buster Keaton or Samuel Beckett.”

A. O. Scott1

“Goodbye Dragon Inn is the best film I’ve ever seen. I think I saw it a year or two after it came out, after I finished Tropical Malady. It really is the ultimate film. Tsai Ming-liang and I share many aspects: the big cinema and the characters there, like the woman who eats watermelon seeds… I really love that.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul in conversation with Bjorn Gabriels2

“The title of Tsai’s new film might suggest that the chronicler of morosely funny Taipei anomie has decided to veer into Jin Dynasty costume epics, but rest assured that Tsai has nothing so Ang Lee in store. I imagine that the nearest he’ll come to King Hu–copping melodramatics is this, a film that entirely takes place in a movie theater during a funerary late-night showing of Dragon Inn, Hu’s light-as-a-silk-slipper 1966 kung-fu adventure flick. It’s a gimmicky sounding premise that should raise copious red flags, were it not for the fact that Liang may be the lone contemporary filmmaker who can be trusted to build something around the superficially acinematic act of watching a movie that will neither smirk with meta coyness nor wallow in awed hommage.”

Nick Pinkerton3

“Most of the dialogue and music in Goodbye, Dragon Inn emanates from Dragon Inn. And the movie within the movie is glimpsed at from a variety of angles, its shifting light patterns cast on the faces of spectators. (At one point, Tsai creates a montage in which the theater manager and the Dragon Inn star Hsu Feng appear to exchange glances.) ‘Did you know this theater is haunted?’ an audience member asks another halfway through. The theater is haunted, both by the specters on the screen and the spectators in the seats, some of whom turn out to be in both movies.”

J. Hoberman4

"And this is, above all, a film about going to the movies; returning to Truffaut, one might call Goodbye, Dragon Inn Tsai's Day for Night, though the more aquatically inclined Taiwanese director, whose oeuvre is so thoroughly drenched in metaphorical waterlogging, imagines films not as trains passing in the night, but as monstrous frigates, unmoored and adrift, which carry their human cargo on a dark free-float. The stowaway-haunted interior of the Fu-Ho, where boys float and brush past each other like buoys, is a ramble of aimless corridors and storage rooms crowded by sagging, soggy cardboard. All of the walls here seem to be the same aquamarine shade of abandoned swimming pools, every corner is stained with dark tendrils of water damage, and everything contributes to the overall appearance of some great vessel's hull, where the all-pervading, echoing soundtrack of Dragon Inn approximates the moans of a pressurized below-deck. This ship's off on an under-booked farewell cruise, and the desolate few spread across this space made for the accommodation of thousands, clustering together then ricocheting apart, are fine material for Tsai's delicately orchestrated tableaux of touch-and-go souls. But so much negative space is also bound to take on a palpable presence of its own, and when one of the Fu-Ho's occupants finally speaks, almost halfway through the film's running time, it's no surprise that it's to inquire, ‘Did you know this theater is haunted?’”

Nick Pinkerton5

“Other ways of watching movies—on a computer and even on a phone—have come to the fore, and, as a result, new ways of living with movies have emerged. They’re no less valid and no less important (the movie lover’s life is greatly enriched by the video essay and the Twitter discussion), but they’re different, practically and psychologically. The corridors, the projection booth, the box office, and even the bathrooms are, in a strange but ineluctable way, a part of the cinema. So is the screen. I like to sit in or near the front row, because my relationship to movie images isn't solely visual or psychological but also physical. Tsai’s film gets at that feeling better than any other movie I’ve seen.”

Richard Brody6

• 1A. O. Scott, "THE FESTIVAL REVIEWS; Last Picture Show: Lives Pass in the Darkness of a Taipei Theater", New York Times, 15 October 2003.
• 2Bjorn Gabriels, "Longing for Change: The Shifting Shapes of Apichatpong Weerasethakul", Sabzian, 2016.
• 3Nick Pinkerton, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn", Reverse Shot, 11 December 2004
• 4 J. Hoberman, "'Goodbye, Dragon Inn’: The Last Picture Show in Taipei", New York Times, 16 December 2020.
• 5Nick Pinkerton, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn", Reverse Shot, 11 December 2004
• 6Richard Brody, “Movie of the Week: 'Goodbye, Dragon Inn',” The New Yorker, 30 September 2014.

EN

“Typical of all of Visconti’s films beginning with Senso, The Damned and Ludwig were, along with Death in Venice, comprised of international casts for the possibilities of dubbing in various European and North American markets. All of these more recent features, though, were filmed primarily in English. But in the earlier Visconti films, the settings and subject matter remained Italian even when the source material was not. With The Stranger, shot primarily in French and Italian, this began to change, roughly coinciding with Visconti’s increased importance as an international cultural figure. By the late 1960s he had begun to detach himself from contemporary political and social concerns in Italy and elsewhere, as well as from issues of Italian history with which younger Italian filmmakers were beginning to actively engage. Guido Aristarco would later write of the “moral crisis” Visconti began to undergo after Rocco and His Brothers, “a retreat into inwardness” in which “the threads of decadence were no longer woven within the fabric of the imperatives of a great historical/moral tapestry.” [...] With the move away from Italian subject matter this inwardness is further manifested. But Visconti was not unique among major Italian filmmakers in this regard. Pasolini, for example, engaged in a similar “retreat” through his Trilogy of Life: The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974). The Damned, Death in Venice, and Ludwig have likewise been seen as a trilogy, although their predetermined status as such is less clear than in the Pasolinis.

[...]

With Ludwig, the slow pacing of Death in Venice continues but, in tandem with the use of the zoom, now acquires a stateliness in a film almost four hours long. In Italy, The Damned was released under Visconti’s preferred title of La caduta degli dei, the Italian translation of Götterdämmerung, or The Twilight of the Gods, a reference to the last of Richard Wagner’s operas of The Ring of the Nibelungen. But it is in Ludwig where Wagner himself materializes as a character, although, unlike Senso, there are no opera sequences and the film’s epic scale is paradoxically tied to its intimacy. And if tragic form is central to The Damned, it is no less central here. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has noted, the struggle over control of dynasties in Ludwig is not typically a theme of the novel but of tragedy. Borrowing a term from Eisenstein, Nowell-Smith argues that the “dominant” of Ludwig is “kingship and the destructive pairing of this with Ludwig’s homosexuality,” in which a “tragic ending is the only one possible.” [...] But neither The Damned nor Ludwig attempt to recreate the poetic forms of verse central to tragedy, although they each make use of dialogue in a different way. In The Damned, the dialogue assumes straightforward functions and often has a melodramatic explicitness. With Ludwig, Visconti returns to collaborating with Enrico Medioli and Suso Cecchi d’Amico and the script has a literary density absent from The Damned. One example of this is how it uses sleep as a motif (so central as well to Macbeth), extending the implications of Ludwig as an indecisive and withdrawn leader, so that sleeping, lethargy, and insomnia infect the entire narrative world and the bed becomes, again for Visconti, central.”

Joe McElhaney1

• 1Joe McElhaney, Luchino Visconti. and the Fabric of Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021), 138-140.