by studioxadmin | Apr 1, 2014 | Capital Punishment, HD: Film Commentary
This post is a response to a movie review for “Nymph()maniac” Vol 1 that I came across in the local free press, I am writing, not to defend its director, as much as position legitimate film commentary out of reach of lazy reviewers such as himself. To pronounce the filmmaker a woman hater was the work of an inquisitor, not a critic. He is employed to increase the understanding of cinema and yet he rants as if he would condemn the film never to be seen. It’s not Lars Von Trier’s best film. I grew weary of watching it too. He’s repeating himself after so many outings. You notice fewer tricks and more ticks, but he’s still a master.
The film reviewer denounced Von Trier’s latest movie as lazy, contrived and boring then went on to write a review that I would characterize the same way. Anyway, lots of good movies are boring the first time I watch them. I have edged into boredom looking at hundreds of them and then was glad that I watched them again.
There was an 11am showing of the new Von Trier flick at “The Mayan,” a lovely, antique movie palace in old south Denver. I had been driving for hours and could have used a nap, but I still laughed all the way through the film. Von Trier’s most enduring quality is on display, his wit. I must admit, the dozen or so in the theater around me didn’t seem to laugh as much, so perhaps I’m a misfit. They were probably cringing, for which my response was just one alternative. We were all experiencing the same unease for the characters. Perhaps the only difference was, I enjoyed it because it was a movie and not real life.
The reviewer in question had one compliment for “Nymph()maniac”, praising Uma Thurman’s work, which was good but might have worked better before an audience, on a live stage. On the other hand, I was most amused by something the reviewer condemned as contrived. I suppose he’s right, but contriving the lighthearted obsessions of a fly fisherman with the world weary gripes of a courtesan past her prime sounds like something out of a Lubitch or Noel Coward play.
The reviewer’s accusation, of non-acting by the ingénue, is misguided as well I believe. An understated performance was the director’s call. I thought the actress modulate beautifully within the confines of her role. I’d dare to guess she was protected from waxing pornographic by stealthy direction. While the nude scenes were somewhat erotic, the screenplay is too multidimensional to be porn. Instead of exciting, it becomes interesting. It comments on porn.
As an interesting side note, my lady and I enjoyed a comedy starring Scarlett Johansson, involving porn addiction at the Sundance Kabuki in Japantown, San Francisco last fall. It’s directed by and also stars Joseph-Gorden-Levitt.
In direct contrast with mainstream internet adult content, in “Nymp()maniac” Vol 1 we are shown the dark side of a disease and acquire compassion. The maker of this film is depending on our social corrective instincts to kick in, not to sexually gratify his audience with one more exposé of skin.
We are already inundated with porn in the media. Responsible members of society need to undertake more and more of these kinds of debates. The moving image in “Nymph()maniac,” Vol 1 makes a forced entry into that frame, imposes on its cheap set-ups with talented actors instead of porn stars, then surrounds them with the very consequences which are customarily omitted in porn. Von Trier is not glorifying Jo’s exploits. He is coming out against the subjugation of women. So, hurray for Mother Nature if we feel obliged to stand up for the victims of sexual predation after watching his movie. Many a movie maker has inspired less noble sentiments in an audience.
Another worthy inquiry embedded in the script, which the reviewer I read never bother to address, is how we rationalize our denials to sooth our egos, like Von Trier’s protagonist. You can’t lie to yourself forever. It’s a universal theme, one that might as well be taken away, even if you didn’t care for the rest. That’s the kind of attitude I prefer, from journalists at free weekly newspapers when writing about films by accomplished filmmakers. The future of many crucial social debates is in the hands of filmmakers. They can have a massive, positive impact on society if they are allowed.
With regard to my own film commentary, I have decided that a person that sits at a desk for hours writing about movies after sitting at the movies for hours thinking about writing about them is engaged in a considerably more lightweight enterprise compared to the dedicated filmmaker that gets out there and gets their films made. We should show some respect.
If the reviewer thinks the Von Trier derived prurient pleasure making this or any of his films, why doesn’t he ask the actors. I’ve never heard anyone accuse this director of rubbing their noses in it. Von Trier just might be aiming his light to penetrate shades of ignorance and denial where we all wallow from time to time.
Lars Von Trier’s movies have, for the most part, compassionately portrayed the ordeals of women. In the meantime, I don’t know of another director that has helped advance the careers of so many female artists.
He’s a trickster, just as his countryman Carl Theodor Dreyer was. If you’re bored, maybe he’s not the one that’s lazy. The man’s fighting for our survival, using everything he’s got to make us think and in one limp, clichéd phrase a careless reporter sinks the boat? That stinks.
by studioxadmin | Mar 31, 2014 | Capital Punishment, HD: Film Commentary
Catholics put together the first Bible and with what we know about how corrupt the Popes were, I doubt the infallibility of its texts. Its been a tool for manipulating the masses ever since. It’s not a bad book. It’s still a good book to me. It may be my favorite read of all time, but it’s been stepped on and tinkered with a zillion times. People abuse it everyday. Its not perfect, but I don’t reject any story that’s been around for this long.
Every storyteller rewrites as they go along, adding and subtracting, incorporating fresh wisdom and prejudice, conforming it to their own limited comprehension and agenda. Stories loose definition and accumulate baggage as they age. The older the story, the larger the blocks with which they are built. They expand and contract over time but their foundations are surprisingly well preserved.
Case in point, the new “Noah,” flick released last week. An ancient tale of humanity faced with cataclysm is given a vivid updating in the hands of Darren Aronovsky. The director had a hit with his “Black Swan” in 2010. His latest outing is even more daring. With quite decent performances from his cast and a bit of deft swapping of story elements and special effects, it is quite easily the best Hollywood bible epic in decades. The characters’ arty haircuts, costumes, make-up, porcelain teeth and British accents all lend romantic splendor to the gathering gloom. Stylistically, there are some brilliant mash ups, embedded quotes of ground breaking films ever so worthy of quoting, such as “Breaking the Waves, (1996), for example, in the way the light and color is applied, like a Thomas Kinkade postcard, to highlight the already deeply enshrined associations we harbor from certain stories and songs. The specific sequence in “Noah” starts out face-to-face with a snake in the grass, proceeds to a ripe fruit being plucked by hand and concludes on with a fist and stone as Cain caves his brother’s head in. This device grounds a very post modern movie in the very old story of its namesake, repeating the sequence through all three acts like a major chord anchoring a symphony, increasing its resonance each time. Reaching into Aronovsky’s distant past, it recalls the dope fix ritual sequence in his second feature, “Requiem For a Dream” (1990), which I wrote about here last month.
In “Noah,” the way the story is updated becomes part of the story itself. There are visual passages in this movie that convey the march of time and the influence of the elements upon a landscape as successfully as anything else I’ve seen. The filmmaker’s out on his edge as an artist, with a huge budget, an outstanding line-up of talent, entrusted by investors and audiences alike to seize the zeitgeist.
It’s a bit of a high-wire act the way Aronovsky takes liberty with the tradition, then inserts Hallmark card-like chapter headings in between, accepting memes that are most sacrosanct and inviolable to the Christian way of seeing, while hopefully entertaining believer and unbeliever alike with something thought provoking on the screen.
Coming attractions that we watched before the movie began made abundantly clear that movies this summer will be dominated by another heaping helping of ecological apocalypse for blockbuster season. Aronosvsky anticipates this and doesn’t weigh us down with too much battlefield angst. The future is in the boat. Noah’s demons are driven inward under the pressure of his immense task. As the occupants are closed inside the ark, it becomes a cannonball that knows not where it flies.
Life in the ark is presented like going under anesthesia for a high-risk surgery, Noah’s determination is tested, to bring its occupants through God’s wrath, and reboot the ecosystem and reintroduce nothing evil. The timing of the boat’s landfall is so perfect that it suggests God’s not dead. Good thing too. By then Noah’s stubborn resolve has made him ruthless and obsessed, but compassion gets the best of him again.
In so doing, he succumbs to selfish love and loyalty to his own, letting in something unpredictable and therefore dangerous to earth’s re-creation. Noah reaches that far shore convinced that he has let God down. The first thing he does, after disembarking, is retreat to a cave, make wine and drown his sorrows. His sons discover him passed-out, naked. They put some covers on him. This detail from the Bible is set up brilliantly in the preceding acts, by repeating the image of a snake coming out of his skin. This accomplishes as much as any other scene in the film to bring the famous floating fortress builder down to the scale where we can relate to him as a human being. While the rain beat down and the rest of the world was shedding its skin, the hero remained vigilant and duty bound. Not until they reach dry land was he able to slough off his own.
Stories chosen for wide release on the big screen are selected by the filmmakers with ultimate care and consideration, so lets’ examine why they gambled on an adaptation of Noah’s flood for movie audiences of 2014. How does Noah’s dilemma reflect our current existential landscape? Might Noah’s spirit reside in every person alive today that assists in protecting nature and humanity from obliteration? Noah charts a path to where no one has ever been before and leaves behind a world that will never exist again. We as humans are faced with precisely this turn of events t0day. Through the old stories, this latest motion picture and a lot of other fine arts and media endeavor to help us prepare.
by studioxadmin | Feb 14, 2014 | Capital Punishment, HD: Film Commentary
While the surveillance state inserts its proboscis into our psychic circulation systems, I will attempt to look on the bright side. It’s an audience. I am accustomed to revealing my most private thoughts and wrestling with my demons in public and listeners are listeners, after all. It’s not for me to pick and choose. I should be glad for the company but seldom has anyone from the public hung in there past the first act. Does this mean at least someone might get through the entire output? What if it sucks? What if it’s so great, they come out of the woodwork as fans? Then, by their word of mouth, my public expands and expands. Pretty soon everybody’s sending me salutations and money. Is that worse than toiling away in obscurity?
It’s not for me to judge you personally. I include myself in the surveillance community. The variety of voyeurism practiced at the multiplex is non-intrusive. Those that subscribe to the golden rule won’t take advantage of their neighbors the same way as films do characters. There is a kind of vigilance about the world around us that is rewarded through natural selection and we can develop that through movie watching. We don’t have to pry into real people’s private lives. Filmmakers have tamed and civilized the act of eavesdropping for us. Movies provide an outlet for our nosy, curious nature without anyone’s privacy actually being disturbed.
Whereas its obvious that the vast majority minds their our own business pretty well, the preponderance of audio/video and other recording technology all around us begs to be turned on. Still, it tickles me to think how far behind the curve the intelligence gathering agencies are. No one keeps tabs on his or her fellow citizens as well as movie watchers. In our society, you can learn more about human beings in a two-hour movie than by living next to them on the same street for years. Anyway, the information we seek most diligently, by scrutinizing the actions of others, should be whatever teaches us most about ourselves and that’s how the movies work.
“Requiem for a Dream,” (2000) is a story of addiction, a gorgeously grimy picture that cuts to the bone. Each time I’ve watched it, it has stayed with me for days. Opening act scenes of the budding romance between pretty addicts make their risk-taking appear glamorous, but love gets mixed-up with getting off, pushing them over the edge. If you’re inquisitive, like me, you’ll hop on the danger train with them while director Aronosvsky examines the tragic spiral from feel good scratch to fetal clutch.
In the same story, there is an elderly woman that lives by herself. She spends her lonely hours watching television. She becomes obsessed with trying to make herself look better and fancies appearing on television as a substitute for a more meaningful connection with her son. What would be considered a softer addiction proves to be equally devastating.
“I wanted to show how addiction is about repetition and obsession.’ Listening to Aronovski’s comments while re-watching the film was informative. “When we were amoebas in the primordial soup we were looking for carbon molecules to get high off of.”
The mix of fantasy and denial that allows addicts to plunge themselves into the abyss is blatantly familiar to us all, at this juncture in history. Unhealthy habits assail us from all directions and none is more potently self-destructive than our dependence on fast, cheap, easy fixes for our complex, long-term, critical challenges.
“It’s about the lengths that people will go to escape reality and when you escape your reality, you create a hole in your present, because you’re not there, you’re off chasing a pipe dream in the future and you’ll use anything to fill that vacuum, coffee, TV, tobacco, heroin to feed the hole. The hole grows and grows until eventually it will devour you. This film is about how you can use anything to get high off of, anything to fill that hole.”
He’s saying everyone wants safety, security and connection. When we feel powerless to get it, we settle for a substitute, but there is no substitute. He said that back in the year 2000, before everything changed. We’re going to follow this filmmaker into next month to review his latest film entitled “Noah,” made 14 years later. The story of the great flood appeals to the part of us that longs for a clean slate. It’s a metaphor for “cold turkey.” Civilization must go through withdrawal, if we’re going to survive, but we’re so badly hooked that we convince ourselves the correction will come from God, or in other words, don’t count on us to do anything but what addicts do.
Aronovsky is fascinated with excess and that works well in a movie that is literally about addiction, such as of “Requiem for a Dream,” but not so swell in his movie about death and dying, “The Fountain” (2006). He achieves mixed results in his films about performers, “The Wrestler” (2008) and “Black Swan” (2010). The work is always daring and visionary, but his stories, with the exception of “Requiem,” tend to collapse under the weight of their own excess. If you’re not up on The Theater of Cruelty, this director will school you with his moves.
The problem often lies with where Aronovsky choses to begin. To my own sense of correct proportion, the third acts of his last three films overshoot the mark by a power of ten. Imagine if Beethoven started his Ninth symphony in the middle. There would practically have to be bombs exploding at the finale.
So we will see if an apocalyptic deluge will be a subject that lends its self to Aronovsky’s predilections. I hope it doesn’t fly off the rails. All concessions to the Theater of Cruelty considered, at one point does one begin pushing back at the screen?
by studioxadmin | Jan 1, 2014 | Capital Punishment, HD: Film Commentary
It’s gone down in the history books that “Dancer in the Dark” director Lars Von Trier was an author of the Dogme 95 Manifesto. I look on it as a publicity stunt, much like the New Wave employed to pull audiences away from Europe’s classical, old school directors in the 1950’s and 60’s.
Neither Von Von Trier nor his pal Vintnerburg took much time setting out the regulations for their “vow of chastity,” and like the patriarchs of many a holy order, they never observed the rules themselves. The guys were undoubtedly high when they wrote it. Not that it wasn’t a good plan. Doors were opened for independent filmmakers that could do more with less thanks to them.
“The Ascent” was made long before Dogme 95, or anything like it. Yet it is a predecessor by default. There was no budget for modern FX shots in Shapitko’s film, so it conforms to that Dogme regulation. The killings are about as low-tech as you can get. Death by rope. While it is a period piece with guns and costumes, I will argue that Shepitko’s choice of time and place was meant strictly to comment on the “here and now” staying true in spirit to the Dogme protocol. It’s scenes were shot on location so, in that way, it conforms as well. The film is not in color but neither is the Russian winter, so the color rule is irrelevant here. It all costs money and so Sheptiko didn’t apply much of a score. She kept music spare using some where it counted most, abandoning it wherever the wailing wind on location could provide more.
My point is that if Dogme 95 was a return to purity of story, superiority of performance and economy of production, “The Ascent” was the kind of movie that Dogme was meant to be a return to. The seal of authenticity in Dogme’s chastity vow will never be more sacrosanct than in Shepitko’s films. We are talking about the anonymous attribution rule. Even though her name was attached, Shapitko was an artist in a socialist country. Ideologically speaking, at least, the films she made were property of the state. The State as Auteur sounds like a great topic for film scholarship, by the way. If someone will commission it, I’d be interested in contributing a piece.
Larissa Shepitko succeeded in convincingly capturing her character’s transformations in long takes. Lars Von Trier goes to the extreme opposite, cutting together Selma’s song and dance routines from a thousand different clips. Every time his blind heroine comes to an emotional turning point, the filmmaker speed shifts into overdrive, covering the action with no less than 100 cameras at the same time. That’s what he claims, anyway. I find the prospect of looking with that many eyes intriguing. Not only is this daring filmmaker spiking his fine tuned drama with good, old-fashioned, mid-20th century song and dance, but all these scenes, featuring Selma’s psychological shape-shifts, are virtually hosed-down. There are cameras concealed everywhere.
“Dancer” is not Dogme. Dogme 95 rhapsodizes ironically over the virtues of chastity which, in this case, was a rejection of superfluous technology of any kind. Even things like props were considered too contrived unless they happened to be found in the place where the scene is filmed. Such constraints appeal to all kinds of artists, not just Dogme directors, for economic considerations if none other. “Dancer” is not a Dogme film anyway. Lars Von Trier has never made one. Anyway, almost everything the man says and does turns into something for him to contradict later on.
When I poled my movie loving friends about “Dancer in the Dark,” a couple of them said they were put-off by Bjork repeatedly breaking into song. Was it because it was Bjork doing it and they don’t like her? Or is that they just don’t like musicals? You know who you are. I’m asking you now.
I’m not fond of many musicals myself, but, by sheer coincidence, I just got home from a screening of Footlight Parade (1933) with James Cagney and Joan Blondell. What a lot of fun that was. If you don’t like musicals, try that one. It sports just the kind of numbers Selma concocts her emotional eclipses with in “Dancer.” My favorite motion picture musical is “Cabaret.” Both “Cabaret” and “Dancer in the Dark” portray single women seeking refuge in the song and dance.
“Dancer,” is an anatomy of hope, an autopsy on denial and a kind of primer on going blind. The project was an experiment with hybrid filming techniques and on the cutting edge in other ways besides. It won the Palme dé Or at Cannes. Bjork won the best actress prize. Von Trier’s gamble allows us to watch a 1950’s American melodrama and a 1930’s Busby Berkley musical, simultaneously, through 21st century eyes.
Bjork wrote the songs for “Dancer in the Dark,” with an assist on lyrics from Von Trier and Sjøn. For the most part they come across. Only the first and the last numbers left me unmoved. I wonder if it’s because Bjork sings with her tongue sticking out that some non-fans can’t take her. She’s too quirky for some, a shaman to others. In any case, the bulk of her musical contributions to this film work wonders.
Art film veteran, Catherine Deneuve makes every line count in her supporting role. She’s a real friend. There are a handful of actors from Europe in the film. All of them except Bjork and Deneuve are playing rural Washingtonians. Deneuve’s character Kathy plays an immigrant and the only actor with a credible accent, I might ad.
With Von Trier, the use of foreigners to play Americans becomes part of the text and works especially well, in the case of character Jeff, played by Swedish actor Peter Stormare. His inconsistent intonations and ninety mile stare contribute to the intended impression that Jeff’s not quite all there.
There are lapses in craft, when it gets right down to it, on both sides of this film. The handheld camerawork, for instance, must have made thousands of more skilled handlers curse Lars Von Trier.
The French New Wave fetishized such accidents, in each other’s work to popularize a new, fast and loose aesthetic. When a movie sweeps me up as profoundly as this one does, to be honest, I don’t really care.
…to be continued next month.
by studioxadmin | Dec 21, 2013 | Capital Punishment, HD: Film Commentary
In memory of the most illustrious hanged man in history, whose birth we commemorate this month, I’ve decided to explore two European motion pictures that end with institutional hangings. The first won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1977. “The Ascent,” by Soviet director Larissa Shapitko. It details a young revolutionary’s climb to the gallows. The second film, from year 2000, Lars Von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark,” features Icelandic pop singer Bjork as a blind, young, single, factory worker bound for the noose. Watch these two films and then come join the discussion.
We often reach back through literature to find parallels in treatment of subject matter. This months subject being capitol punishment I didn’t have to delve very far back for something stellar. Like Kafka’s “ In the Penal Colony,” “The Ascent” is not about capitol punishment. Nor are the two films in this series.,Even though their story lines climax with executions, they are about something much more personal to each of us. As I see them, both films are focused on the integrity, or lack of, in each character more than the right or wrong of the punishment. At least Von Trier states as much, on the commentary track for “Dancer in the Dark” (Criterion edition).
We aren’t given that much time to sift through credos or dogmas in either film. The masterstroke in Shepitko’s opus must be how we are permitted to acquire sympathy for the humanity even in the enemy, especially the ruthless police inspector, whom the camera successfully susses out for that torturing angel of conscience that flits up in his eyes.
“The Ascent” becomes, essentially, a passion play. We don’t realize it until the very end. Gradually, the character Sotnikov’s peculiar compassion takes us in, but his motives can not be instantly, fully ascertained. When he finally does transcend, we don’t have long to admire him. That’s is usually how this type of story unfurls. But instead of thieves on the crosses beside this savior, there swing innocent folk on those ropes, including an elder farmer, a single mother and adolescent girl. All three of those punished with Sotnikov are utter strangers to the condemned man, which seals his second to last breath with karmic remorse. The last one is reserved for a redemptive exchange between the accused and an innocent in the crowd of onlookers for whom this hanging has been staged.
I cannot adequately describe the poignancy with which the execution scene in this movie is presented. We’ll try to provide you with a reference. The image above, of a painting by Paul Delaroche, “Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1834) seems to harbor some of the same spirit. This roughly 8 X 10 foot canvas is among the most emotionally overwhelming objects I have ever seen. Coincidentally, this particular image of the painting that you are looking at has been cited as one of the finest images on the entire English Wikipedia. Search your conscience, while examining this image, for a key to the end of “The Ascent,” and “Dancer in the Dark.” What’s wrong with this picture? Lady Jane was elevated to the throne for less than a month before she was deposed and beheaded by a relative, in a bid for power by protestants against Catholics during that time. The victim was scarcely 17 years old.
“Dancer” will be zoomed in on next month. In “The Ascent,” the child actress, Lyudmilla Polyakova, gets to be a part of one of the most tender and lyrical passages in cinema, just as the noose slips around her neck. Shepitko orchestrates the scene for maximum heartbreak. It’s like something straight out of Chaplin’s “The Kid,” but with darker twists. Let’s begin dissecting this sequence with her approach to the noose. It was obviously tied up there for someone much taller. Because, evidently, not even the chief of the gallows could correctly anticipate the needs of this hanging. So a square apple box booster is hastily brought out and laid on top of the too short trunk of tree. All these things look gigantic next to the sparrow-like frame of the little girl. Those heavy implements of demise take on the scale of sandbox toy or circus ring geometry, reminiscent of children’s playthings. She’s a hatchling, for God’s sake. Those goddamn Nazi’s plan to hang her. That’s an act of terror. Tissues please.
Shepitko cares about human beings that will die before they outgrow the playground. She confronts us with an innocent being blatantly victimized. Watch this one take that giant step. She’s literally lifted off the ground by the hangman, by taking hold of his hand. The staging evokes some father helping his daughter on the jungle gym. She slips her head through the loop and peeks out at the spectators like baby bird on a limb. It is an evocation of pure pathos. Why should a child go through this? Authorities commit such atrocities to provoke fear.
What are we afraid of? Before he’s captured, in those wintery wilds of Russia, near the close of WWII, Sotnikov appears too physically weak to buck the status quo. Marooned in the forest, sporting a bad cough in his chest and a slug of lead in his leg, he rails against the branches on a low hung bow. Right out on the screen, for all to comprehend, here, a “man for the people” rues the masterplan’s unraveling, but at this stage, all we can see is a hurt soldier trapped like a rabbit under a tree. There’d be scant evidence that he’s a figurehead for the resistance, except for this one, raw expression of rage.
The backdrop for this rabbit hunt is rendered all the more claustrophobic with shrouds of snow dust whipping about all the time and a howling wind singeing everything else back down to zilch. By the way, let’s own up once more, thanks to Shepitko’s camera crew, to how old-fashioned 1:33:1 black and white film can convey the menace of frigid skies and fields as good as anything digital and new.
“The Ascent” has been called Shapitko’s masterpiece. I can’t find any reason why not. The filmmaker made her warm-hearted tragedy in the bitterest cold. Her ability to capture such subtly nuanced performances, consistently, in uncommonly long takes, under harsh conditions indicates bona-fide directorial grace. Her actors display world-class gifts. Sensors often made it hard for auteurs working inside the Soviet egg to make their movies competitive at international contests, but this one broke the shell.Prolonged, intimate close ups invite us to witness and be amazed at the ways ligament and scruple can hitch and mesh inside the human face.
In the political chess game of that took place during those times, history lays much of the blame on Nazis. Including this in her anti-war film probably helped Shepitko avert big showdowns with censors, but it was popular with everyone because she struck a universal chord. There was evidently enough of an openness to gender equality built in to that republic at that time, for an enlightened woman director to make positive contact with the outside world. Shepitko’s movie as well as Delaroche’s painting propose, at the level of conscience, we are all pretty much the same. Everyone that looks at them comes to the same conclusion.
“The Ascent” is an adaptation from the novella “Sotnikov” by Vasili. Bykov. I don’t know how it begins, but the opening of Shepitko’s film frames a blizzard on a Russian landscape. Violent gusts whip snow crystals and ice dust into pale, grainy gradations of grey. Silent telegraph poles lean both ways like staggered burial markers along the railroad right of way.
A vanishing veil of snow serves as a wipe reveal of a village, in the near distance, in which no one is left to defend.
This and a hand full of other shots are re-inserted after the finale of the film, like bookends. Was the filmmaker suggesting that the way out in of this predicament is the same as the way in? Or are we simply left reminded of home and liberty lost at the end?
A vacant village and machine gun fire is the first sign we see and hear as the film begins. Then a man’s upper body pops up from a hiding place and signal’s to retreat with his arm. Many heads pop up. What’s left of the population of that village ascends into view from the bottom of the frame. We watch from behind, the backsides of folks in retreat, fleeing in fear. Does this ascension accentuate a notion of this population’s “rebirth” as refugees, or perhaps The Rapture is being interpreted quixotically?
Either way, through lashing wind, extended families and neighbors carry what they may and make their way over snowscapes warily. A few rifles hang off uniformed shoulders of mutinous soldiers, shepherding those gentle folk as kin. As 2013 comes to an end and 2014 begins. Let us pray this historical trend stops before it sweeps us all in.
…next month, “Dancer in the Dark.”
