While on the whole I found this a lackluster work compared to other Northern European directors, there is no denying the genius of the final act. Dour Danes versus French Epicureanism in a crescendo of hyperphagia that is more than just subtly perverted. While you can find much better representations of Scandinavian austerity in Dreyer’s Ordet or Bergman’s Winter Light, none of those filmmakers would have had a dinner scene like this. Closer to contemporary artists like Kore-eda in the…
The genius of Bergman is that I liked this film while still disliking opera. The Magic Flute is pretty ridiculous and dumb as a story, and the libretto is more poorly written than pop lyrics. But that doesn’t matter when you see Bergman’s staging, camera coverage, set design, and enthusiastic framing devices—from the faces of the audience to the unbelievable stagecraft that transforms the proscenium into forests and castles with a snap. Magical and breathtaking in its ambition. This reveals something to me of what people really love in opera: not the work itself but the excess in performance by a master impresario.
There are many surrealist directors, from Jean Cocteau to Luis Bunuel to David Lynch. Jacques Tati, however, is one of the few recognizably situationist directors (the list would certainly also include Richard Linklater). The situationists believed that the urban landscape was an efficient manifold for chance interactions, and that perfectly describes the aimless derive of Tati’s films, especially PlayTime. In Trafic Tati expands the aleatoric play from the cityscape to the highway system. On the highway signals propagate in chain…
“The scent of incense remains even when the smoke disappears.”
In this film, the incense of Parajanov, Resnais, Victor Erice, and Tarkovsky lingers. Less open and less neutral than most slow cinema, because its function is hypnogogic as much as artistic. Utterly entrancing and musical in its composition. A potent film that meditates on migration and return—on the odyssey of returning to the homeland of childhood memory. It’s easy to get lost in its hazy spell. If you ever wanted…
