In his first feature film, The 400 Blows, Francois Truffaut exhibited the heartfelt and personal style that would become his trademark. Truffaut liked to make movies that were intensely personal; however, in his third feature film, he looked outside of his own life and decided to adapt Henri-Pierre Roche’s semiautobiographical novel, Jules and Jim. While Jules and Jim is obviously personal to Roche, it is also a uniquely personal reflection of Truffaut. Truffaut’s use of camera, editing, music, and narration combine to make an extraordinarily emotional and personal film that’s part traditional and part New Wave.
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Seymour Chapman writes in Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World, of the Å“many terms that have been used to describe a Å“life lacking in purpose, in passion, [and] in zest, essentially a Å“life of spiritual vacuity. Such a complex state of mind is nearly impossible to describe in words, more or less images, yet Chapman proposes that Antonioni was able to portray such a complicated state of emotion Å“convincingly in his film, L’Avventura. Antonioni establishes this difficult theme of ennui and dissatisfaction in all of his characters through his control over the film’s dialogue, the character’s actions, and the mise-en-scene.
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It’s been exactly two years since I first saw Zhang Yimou’s The House Of Flying Daggers at the world’s greatest theater, the Palais Du Cinema, as part of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Since that time, I’ve always wondered if my endless praise for the flick was due in part to the film’s merit or was it due to the sheer joy of seeing an insane action flick on a screen the size of Canada with the most vocal, film-drunk crowd imaginable–all the while living it up on the beaches of Southern France. Well, I just rented the movie and I’ll assure you of this: the praise is merited. Simply put, The House Of Flying Daggers is an exceptional movie. Here’s why:
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According to Wikipedia, Blade Runner, came out 24 years ago this June 27th. To mark the occasion, I asked our dear friend, Matthew, to write a brief review. Enjoy - Dan
As one of the various mediums through which cultural theories are posited, the cinema is saturated with nuanced expressions of humans as the locus for a confluence of formative social ideologies. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner exhibits a multitude of cultural propositions which serve to delicately raise questions about the manner in which humans define themselves within society, and the mechanism through which meaning is assigned to social interaction. The primary means employed by the film to illuminate some of the fallacies of human social systems is the production of replicants as a physical manifestation of the mechanical nature of humans within a commercially-driven environment. I propose that the replicants function as a mirror that allows humans to glimpse their own modes of production and identity formation by displacing erroneous human behavior onto synthetic creatures. In this way, Blade Runner—especially through Deckard’s interrogation of Rachael and the proceeding exchange between Deckard and Tyrell—elucidates several aspects of Louis Althusser’s contentions on the topics of reproduction of the conditions of production and the interpellation of the subject under the umbrella of Ideological State Apparatuses.
[more...] posted on 4:07 pm 05/10/2006
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30 years ago last February 8th, “Taxi Driver” was released. I asked our correspondent, Matthew, to write a brief review to honor the occasion. Here it is: - Dan
The individual in contemporary capitalist consumer society is subject to a wide range of elements that serve to obfuscate his or her notions of selfhood, position within the social framework, and the factors that constitute the fabric of identity. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver illustrates this struggle through the protagonist, Travis Bickle, as he is confronted with the intense feelings of alienation offered by life in New York’s postmodern culturescape and he is consequently forced to struggle with the search for his own identity in an environment where the notion of “Ëœthe individual’ is grounded in ephemeral relationships to other people and, more importantly, in consumers’ relationships to the images presented by the media. Bickle is especially impacted by television and the presentation of human interactions therein, as he derives his understanding of socialization from television soap operas and of love through pornographic films (Friedman 71). Furthermore, his experience of the city is rarely direct, but is rather viewed like a television through the windows of his cab and is even further distorted/inverted by his rearview mirror, as he never looks at passengers directly, but only through the inverting mechanism of the mirror which “reduces the world and the people in it to meaningless objects, alike in their numbing sameness” (80). Thus, Travis enjoys a somewhat privileged position of detachment from the events of the city”â€a spectator always separated from the dilapidation that evokes such disgust in him by at least one layer of glass”â€and is able to therefore pass harsh judgment on the scene that perpetually plays out before his eyes. Travis then utilizes his scopophilia to absorb the violence inherent within the city and to reflect it back at the society that has inculcated its membership with a penchant for cold brutality, limitless consumptive urges, and tendency to dissolve into the homogeneity of capitalist sentimentality. However, Travis finds these urges to be problematic, for the environment of the city does not seem to hold a place for him and he finds only revulsion for the city and its inhabitants. Thus, the course of the film develops an increasingly titanic struggle within Travis to discover a comfortable niche in a hostile atmosphere and each step of his journey can be understood as a move towards the establishment of his identity as an individual”â€not merely a “fluid set of effects produced by processes of signification or discourse,” (Dunn 65) but rather an agent in control of his own position on the social stratum. For Travis, the need to exercise his agency accumulates momentum in a variety of areas, from his desire for Betsy, her rejection of him, and his desire to save Iris from a life of prostitution, as well as all of his experiences of the violence inflicted by the city”â€its oppressive imagery, nefarious citizenry, consumption of bodies, and the ubiquitous squalor of urban decay” all of which culminate to the point of his murderous catharsis. Violence functions as a means through which Travis’s identity crystallizes as something more concrete than a dynamic catalogue of images seen on television and appropriated for personal application, for the commitment of violence drastically alters the manner in which society must view Travis (and consequently how he must view himself) by not only transporting him into the media limelight, but also by establishing his personal agency within a world that refutes the notion that a person can truly be an individual or an agent.
Click below to continue reading Matthew’s analysis:
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