<b>The author of this article, "Lycidas", welcome to the Douban App to follow Ta. </b>
Summary of previous years: 2016|2015
I. Collage Movies
This year, due to various coincidences, collage films have become the most important part of my movie-watching experience, and because of the need for visits, it is a category of slightly systematic research, and I am probably a person who is more obsessed with materials, so this form has an irresistible appeal to me, especially after dialogue with filmmakers. Two regrets: 1. Never had the chance to see Guy Maddin's new work, The Green Fog, a film collage retelling of Vertigo, and the soundtrack is Kronos Quartet, who collaborated with Bill Morrison on Beyond Zero: 1914-1918, arguably the most anticipated work of the year; Lewis Klahr could not be interviewed. Otherwise, as brother said, it will take a year to gather the three top characters who are now doing collage movies. Stacey Steers
Interview with Locarno (at the end of the interview I also briefly wrote about the origin and development of the collage film)
Alchemy's Edge / Hunter of the Night / Enchanted Canyon
The theme of Stacey Steers' collage trilogy is related to time and women, and she looks for images and patterns engraved with memory marks in ancient materials, dismantling, stitching and reconstructing them one by one with pious and patient knife scissors and the stitches of time. The forgotten silent female figure of the early 20th century is reborn here, and the surrealist ghost from the ruins is full of death-breathing metaphors, dancing in 8 frames per second of old images, celebrating the revival of the bygone era.
Bill Morrison
Sitges interview
"The Light Is Crying" / "Decay Fantasia"
Bill Morrison never hid his love of decay and corruption. The material that makes up his film comes almost entirely from semi-destroyed silent film —speckled, scratched and burned-and-burned images of ghostly shadows, eerie, light and shadow intertwining on the screen in the most incredible way. Lying in an iron box waiting for the time to spontaneously combust at any time, the abandoned child was accidentally given an extremely anxious and untouchable melancholy beauty by such a pair of lovers' hands.
Lewis Klahr
Sixty-Six / Altair / The Illusion of Aging
Lewis Klahr's obsession with Pop Culture in the 1960s and 1970s, whether it was comic strips, newspaper advertisements, or pulp fiction and melodrama, was combed and reorganized into an American materialist allegory, different from the ephemeral nature of the material itself, and obtained a mythical immortality. The irregular visual design and the extremely obscure and mysterious narrative make his works appear dream-like chaotic interlacing. Cities, architecture, gender relations, crime, utopia, consumerism and other social concepts allow them to distill a deeper and broader memory of individual and collective cultural history.
In addition, Kihachiro Kawamoto's "Travel" is also a very collage-textured animation that distinguishes it from his other works, and the two edited versions have their own advantages, which are worth watching.
II. Rediscovery of the film
Every year, countless movies are forgotten, and when you look through the list, it is sometimes difficult to remember when and where a movie was seen, what kind of story it told, and what kind of mood you had when you watched it. Slow is a film with a general look and feel, even if it is touched by a lot of emotions at the time of watching the film, it will gradually fade under the flood of time over and over again. Other films, which we are out of reach because of geographical and other limitations, are born in a cultural context that we are not familiar with, and are therefore taken for granted.
Why watch movies? Why talk about movies? What is the significance of film criticism and curation? The answers to these seemingly straightforward questions may not be simple. Should we repeatedly explore the known history of cinema, over-interpret it, invent theories and frameworks, and immerse ourselves in the illusion of omniscience and self-satisfaction, or should we step into the shadows of the unknown and venture into the small beauty of a corner of the jungle?
Of the following two films, one was once a forgotten one and the other is from a region I never knew. Sitting in the dark hall, I was deeply ashamed of my limitations, and I felt fortunate that there were still such fearless discoverers in the world.
The discoverer is none other than Locarno, who, after 70 years of being increasingly conservative and uninteresting, locarno still seems to be a bold and active child, consistently experimenting with and exploring new cinematic languages and forms. As its influence has grown, the festival has gained greater power, not only in the search for creative new filmmakers in the present, but also in the search for lost treasures in areas of under-concern and even in historical faults, and it is not an exaggeration to call it the most wide-sighted, inclusive and aesthetically high film festival.
Wes Anderson is playing with the leftovers of this film (black his own director is not distressed)
"Praise of the Mountains"
Jonas Mekas' brother Adolfas Mekas' tiny-budget film received widespread critical attention when it was released in 1963, and was even hailed by The New York Times as "the wildest and wittiest comedy of the year." In a review for The Film Handbook, Jean-Luc Godard said: "The Mountain Salute is a clear testament to Adolfas as a filmmaker to be valued. He is a master of pure creativity, that is, he constantly tries dangerous methods – 'no safety net'. His films, constructed according to a concept of every shot— a golden code like this— exude a wonderful air of refreshing genius and wit. But today, 54 years later, the film is hardly known, and even though it is a representative work of New York underground cinema that played a pivotal role in the American New Wave movement, it is still difficult to find in various retrospectives.
Looking at it now, this crazy and creative film still challenges the audience with its inherent modernity, the sense of humor is not outdated, and it has an air of freedom that is difficult to see in any film today — whether it is a casual and rambunctious plot or a surreal manic jump, it is full of pleasant experimental meaning. In addition, the film also has a deep fan feeling: the homage to D.W. Griffith, the common love triangle of Hollywood's golden age, the cartoonish exaggerated setting, the actor Buster Keaton-esque performance - there are still careful considerations lurking under the chaotic and ostentatious appearance.
Unfortunately, Adolfas failed in both subsequent directing works, and he immediately went behind the scenes to concentrate on working as an editor for Jonas. He taught at Bard College in the 1970s, forming a new film school and opening the MFA Master's program in the 1980s, after which he served as dean for a long time and taught until 2004. As people gradually accepted Adolfas as a scholar, the glimmer of "Mountain Praise", which had illuminated the long river of history, was quickly forgotten.
《28》
Open Doors is arguably Locarno's most visionary unit, a project dedicated to supporting and focusing on third world countries where independent cinema has scarce conditions for development. From 2016 to 2018, the unit focused on the diverse film landscape and film talents in South Asia, "28" comes from Sri Lanka, where culture is relatively closed, and films are rare outside the country, so this screening is even more precious.
This film is basically in the form of a road movie, several light and dark clues are intertwined, and the narrative difficulty is not small, but the timing of each shaking bag is very accurate, so that the audience's emotions have an upward and progressive gradient. The performances of all the actors are simple and sincere, which is moving. The narration of the deceased is used as a carrier of the main theme expression, and the sound effects and visual design that are completely different from the main line make another layer of poetic laying under the suspense stacking.
Violence has never been seen head-on, but it has been ubiquitous: the victims of murder and rape in morgues are mostly young women, their bodies are scattered and decayed, unclaimed; bigamy is very common because there is no monogamous legal provision; women are unscrupulously spied on by village men when they bathe... All kinds of tragic phenomena hit the social shackles of Sri Lanka's high crime rate and the low status of women.
III. Favorite movie of the year
∆ 10 non-fiction books
Cannibalism
An extreme sense of immersion, creepy silence and gaze.
The Ship of the Underworld
Looking back, I still feel that it is a very incredible movie-watching experience, I did not have the slightest expectation for the film before entering the scene, but in the end I was completely impressed by the huge narrative volume accommodated in just 67 minutes, as if I had experienced a long and fantastic treasure hunt. The distinct materials of the chapters are mixed and intertwined with the text, bringing a kaleidoscopic layer of rich collage, and the clues secretly snake under the surface, until the full picture of the events at the last moment is revealed, returning to the theme of the shadow, which is quite moving.
Part of the film's unique temperament comes from the well-arranged chapters, which pave the way to the truth. There is a strong sense of "curation" and craftsmanship for the presentation of content, which exists in the area between essay film and collage film, and is a kind of "museum" existence in experimental images. (Last year's "Innocent Memory" also has this nature) The aggregation of content goes beyond editing and is arranged at a higher level. The chapter setting is a distinctive sign, like a sign in the exhibition, leading the audience to cut into the understanding of the main idea in a preset mode. It is undeniable that this line of thinking shows the director's great control and imagination over the structure. But is this kind of comprehensive guidance necessary? Does this oppressive approach somehow limit the malleability of the film's expression and deny the freedom of the audience's understanding?
Of course, as a new director's second feature film, the shortcomings are still obvious, the rough traces brought by low cost can be seen everywhere, and the execution is by no means perfect. For example, the semi-fiction cruise line that occupies nearly half of the space has a clear sense of fragmentation, and the last paragraph is hastily and rigid compared to the previous patient and meticulous laying, and it is not precise and dexterous enough. But in today's homogeneous filmmaking, the importance of such an eye-catching and discussion-provoking work is self-evident.
Dawson City: Frozen Time
The beginning mentions two pure experimental films by Bill Morrison, which, like his previous "The Great Flood", are more in the documentary category, and therefore not as eerie and colorful as his pure experimental subjects, and the structure is more clear. I really like that the details of the first half, which are almost randomly unfolded, echo each other in the unpredictable moments of the second half, and become an organic whole, looking back across the long river of time, and giving birth to a trace of historical sadness. Alex Somers' soundtrack is also quite good. For other aspects of the film, see the director's interview.
Praise nothingness
Poetry and banter, lyricism and cleverness, irony and innocence, all balanced just right. The almost invisible loose connection between the picture and the text echoes the depiction of "Nothing"—it is both fictional and real, seemingly existing only in abstract concepts and seemingly floating in everyone's heart and eyes. Iggy Pop narration was perfect.
Booklet transmission
An extremely pure literary film, detached from all the shackles of purpose, free to roam in different forms, textures, languages and sounds. The scenes all have a strong sense of stage, and the dozens of letter readers whose identities have been erased are like a resting Shakespeare actor, coming and going at will, sitting or standing, singing or reading, or silent. At the end of the 145-minute period, the whole person is caught up in the torrent of emotions, and it seems that everything around it is in ashes, and only the beauty of the words echoes endlessly.
Director Rita Azevedo Gomes is not only an important female director of the Portuguese New Wave, but also collaborated with Manoel de Oliveira, João Pedro Rodrigues, Miguel Gomes, Joaquim Pinto and others, and also worked as a curator and publisher in the Portuguese Film Archive for more than 20 years. She famously said, "I chose to experiment because telling real movies was so boring." "The previous work "A Woman's Revenge" is also worth watching.
78/52
True Thesis Film. A huge and meticulous lens disassembly, full of scientist-like rigor. The reading of these 52 seconds is both deep and rich, most of the interviewees are technicians (especially editors), and there are enough dry goods between words, even if they have watched "Horror" many times after watching this film, they still have the feeling of reading ten years of books. And 52 seconds away, bathroom shots and Hitchcock's sociocultural influences also unfold seemingly inadvertently as secondary clues, adding a thick undertone to the whole. The whole film is beautiful and deep in one breath, and it is very enjoyable to watch.
Paris Opera
The beginning and the turn are precise and perfect: the ups and downs of the story and emotions, the threat and resolution of crises and dilemmas, the characters appearing, leaving, returning to the stage in the next act, or never looking back; the pace of time is not absolute in the film, and fast forward and slow release complement each other. Coupled with the coordination of background music and the transformation of observation perspectives, the film and the opera house have the same texture - both a complex and layered architecture of space, but also a self-contained flowing drama.
Good luck
The picture is quiet and long, and you can hardly smell any intervention behind the camera. Long shots deep into the mine have a sci-fi-like ethereal aesthetic, interspersed with black-and-white Warhol-style "audition" passages where the co-workers decide when to turn off the camera, and the silent gaze has a powerful empathy.
My french film journey
The film prose is full of private memories, and the emotions between the words are particularly moving. At the end of "Life Trivia", Romy Schneider walked into the crowd and gradually blurred, only to find that three hours flew by, as if a dream had suddenly awakened, knowing that the best time was gone.
Sea Surface Variations
Time, space, meaning, form, these materials usually used for narrative retreat into the wind, wildfire, dust and sparse plants of nature in this film, and observe with great abstraction and poetry the group of stowaways who are in a dilemma, and the moment they bet, they are stripped of all the right to choose, and can only be obliterated or exhausted in the void. The uncomfortable separation of sound and painting, the shaking and long lens expression, is a portrayal of the difficult existence of the border, and the monotonous dilemma of the border itself.
【Special Mention】
The story of Leroy
Looking at this story of decades ago, even now, in this era of fake news, which even now feels extremely absurd, I can't help but feel a little more than a little bit of nothing new under the sun. Seeing the ending seems to be caught in some kind of confusion, and the truth and falsity in the words of the parties seem to become relative concepts. The theme is wonderful and undeniable, but it is regrettable that the film itself has a relatively large problem in both structure and material arrangement, and has not reached its due strength.
Double game: James Banning and Richard Linklater
Watching Benning and Linklater, two completely different people chatting so naturally and casually, inexplicably remembering Shakespeare Henry Vi's sentence "My light can only be darkness, my day can only be night", about the harmony between them is so incredible and natural.
Admonition
How can an event that has been bombed by the media and all the details are already known to everyone, and how can we find something new from it? This ticket-like experimental film uses a variety of techniques, precisely arranged materials, a well-written narration and a flexible hand-drawn animation to tell the conflict in the 2006 World Cup final that is shrouded in layers of mystery.
【Problem】
prototype
Ever since Locarno watched the film, it has become a stem in my heart. It seems that I have never felt so contradictory and confused because of a movie before. Based on stereograms taken after the hurricane of 1900, Blake Williams, an American installation artist, shows another possibility of human history, and on the one hand, I love the concept of the film, which explores: If technology did not follow the known path of development, how would we look at the world now? Stylized images and unique sound designs are very appealing.
On the other hand, the director chose to use 3D technology to present this idea, because the logic of the film is inevitable; the contradiction is that after the audience puts on the 3D glasses, the immersion is almost destroyed, and the plastic bracket on the bridge of the nose is distracted and completely blocks the reception of the audiovisual design of the film.
∆ 10 groups of drama classes
This summary, noting the inherent commonalities in the favorite films, made some classifications in the ranking, but did not deliberately become a system, just the sum of some intuitive feelings. Neck to be slaughtered
In the face of the helplessness of the clash of faiths, the anxious desire for revenge and the impossibility of realization. Tropical restlessness, nine days of ritual. The whole film is almost anti-plot, but that sense of disorder and dislocation is what makes it fascinating. The form is also extremely free, and the overlapping changes of the format, color and lens movement bring an exceptionally strong aesthetic impact. 【Minimalist and ordinary】First line + 3/4 + summer of 1993 + some kind of woman + deeper than the sea
These films should constitute one of my favorite forms of the year, although from five very different countries and cultural backgrounds thousands of miles apart, but there is a surprising internal consistency, whether it is the natural, simple and gentle atmosphere that surges in the narrative, or the abandonment of over-design and complex visual effects in the technique, the actor's performance is not exaggerated, but strives to be close to (or even that is) the effect of improvisation.
Kim Tae-joo's second feature film, "First Journey", was a project vigorously supported by the Statewide Film Festival, and was also praised by Mark Peranson, the chief filmmaker of Locarno and the editor-in-chief of Cinema Scope, and eventually won the award. Whether it is the improvisation of the actors or the complete de-complexity of the techniques, this film presents a sense of white-painted agility and natural flow. Anxiety, loss and confusion, from the table to the table, spread to every section of the road traveled by car, a scene of trivial and ordinary daily life, wrapped in the ordinary hope of continuing, into the torrent of life.
Also describing family relations, "3/4" is filled with natural and quiet fragments of life and the sometimes floating sad farewell atmosphere, which moves people to circulate between families. The resolution of the tragedy and the disappearance of the heart knot in "Summer of 1993" are also completed with the help of the details captured one by one under the transparent lens, and the performance of the young actors is extremely outstanding.
"Some Kind of Woman" was seen at the end of last year and re-watched in theaters this year. More and more, I feel that the Taiwanese translation title "A Moment That Belongs to Them" perfectly summarizes the temperament of this film. Any attempt to dissolve, seemingly inadvertently, is as light as a weight, and the undercurrent is surging. The frustration hidden by the thin layer of ice moves forward with the torrent of life, and the cold sunlight of winter involves hope and loss, just as if nothing has been said, and as if everything in the world has been said.
Finally, it is the sorcerer of ordinary life! Drying corpses
This translation is really a bit funny!!
From the very beginning, the head was blasted open by the brutal and gorgeous editing, and the whole audience felt the bullets flying around in the brain, bursting out of the flashing gold powder. Multi-perspective time games and crime stories are not new in concept, but the extremely tight narrative rhythm and ultra-high concentration of visual + sound design eliminate any possibility of cold scenes. I can't imagine how cool it would be to see the IMAX Atmos once! Standing on the edge of the abyss
Fukada still has a kind of cold and demonic atmosphere, multiple sound rhythms such as death knell, several echoes of calm condensation do not show traces, but the precision and delicacy of the knife to see the blood, such as the beginning of the dinner table mother-daughter dialogue to the end of the deep meaning, a word into a slur is heart-wrenching. Seemingly everyday but cold as a ghostly narrative sweeps the audience into it like a torrent, and the surreal details that flicker between them always make people shine. Despite the night
Samuel Beckett writes: "All subconscious attempts to reconstruct the invisible and the unimaginable into reality are futile"; while Grandrieux proves the possibility of such reconstruction with pure and extreme images, the ending sentence "Life, it makes me invisible" may be both a sad sign and a declaration.
[Black and White Vision] Devil's Time + Vazanti
There are some ethereal gods in the visual design and storyline, and the closed environment in which the story takes place, the fate of the characters and even the tragedy of the ending are equally related. In the morally ambiguous, half-life, half-dead world of Devil's Time, it seems that no strange phenomenon is worth fussing about, but the human heart is still hard to find. The night when the soul was soaked with relative silence in the torrential rain, even the abandonment of life to go to the other world to reunite was extremely difficult, and it was true that love was colder than death.
In "Vazanti", there is more involvement in the chaos of desire and class, and fate returns in the silent and condensed lens: life and death are just two sides of the coin, and the hope that is slowly conceived can still die in an instant, so tragic fate is the only end.
【Change and constant】Spain tour + gold export
The two films are put together not because they are similar, but because they are different. The same director and team can change almost nothing for many years, or they can be reborn between two consecutive works; what is more interesting to me is that I still eat that set of unchanged, and what has changed is that I like it very much.
"Journey to Spain", as the third part of the British old man duo eating and drinking tourism imitation game, was originally a personal fun album, and did not have too high expectations, but as always, it was happy to watch. This laugh should be the most audience-friendly, bowing to Winterbottom. After watching home and re-watching the first part, the details echoed really meticulously for 7 years, whether it was Cass or Buried (singing pop songs, she's only xx years old, imitating Michael Caine and Roger Moore) or even Michael Nyman, who chose the soundtrack, has always been consistent, making people always have a sense of intimacy with old friends and smile, like the romance of old British men!
In "The Golden Exit", Alex Ross Perry changed the radical surprise of the previous work and made many new attempts with the same team (such as no handheld camera from beginning to end, geography and environment are no longer used for narrative, etc.), and the interlaced connections between the characters are handled very lightly and dexterously, and the discussion of the relationship between men and women is quite Hong Shangxiu. Although I still prefer the exciting viewing experience of "The Queen of the Earth", this gentle and amiable sketch really makes people see a different side of the director. (Maybe it's because I'm married!) ）
[Fable] Dog + Ms. Hyde
"Dog" is a film that Locarno saw by mistake this year, and he liked it very much. It can be seen as a wonderful intertextuality with Kafka's Metamorphosis, the male protagonists Jacques and Gregor also once had harmonious family relations and considerable social status, but after the change, both of them inevitably lost everything and were quickly kicked out of the human world, no different from the animal situation. For the male protagonist, the world as a human is rapidly collapsing, and the huge pressure and sense of loss allow him to find the possibility of escape in the identity of the animal at the same time, but this illusory sense of security is only temporary, and as the balance is broken, he is also completely plunged into the abyss of alienation. The absurdity of magical reality makes any warmth a distant luxury, and the blunt and sharp irony pierces the hypocrisy of interpersonal relationships like a steel needle, a unique technique that seems to deviate from the superficial reality but does not violate the internal logic, making it a masterpiece that explains the relationship between people and between people and between people and self.
Bozon's weird cold humor mixed with the horror cult temperament of "Dr. Incarnate" makes "Lady Hyde" a unique film that cannot be classified. Huppel's performance switches back and forth between cowering depression and violent coldness, which is very powerful. Uncovering the seemingly light-hearted surface, the film's core actually touches on a series of social issues, avoiding falling into the trap of pure farce. 【Human Comedy】Son of Joseph + Roaming Soap Opera
"Son of Joseph" is Eugene Green's nerve knife religious small theater, warm and touching. And "Roaming Soap Opera" is Ruiz's magic box-like exquisitely crafted reality needle, a burst of blood into the wood. If you don't know Spanish, you can lose a lot of laughs (some of them are completely word games), and it is not so easy to understand. Both have a sense of dislocation that does not belong to this era, so there is an extra layer of charm. Three billboards
The details are exceptionally precise, and the tender sentimentality that cannot be hidden in the crazy paranoia. That ward scene wept away the tears of the whole month.
Your hometown you can't escape, your broken dreams. You are an angel and a clown, freedom is your beacon, and the shadow is your servant.
【Other (too lazy to write one by one) masterpieces】
skin
Manchester by the sea
There's no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.
Poetry has no end
Polite (I don't understand why the title of the film must be translated into a four-word phrase, very stupid)
Porto
The disaster artist falls in love with Fu Lan ♥ again
My whole high school sank into the sea super cute! Invincible cute!
Old lucky
“You get older. In the end, you end up accepting everything in your life -- suffering, horror, love, loss, hate -- all of it. It's all a movie anyway, the whole phantasmagoria -- it's all meaningless. There is no answer to any of it ultimately. ” -- Harry Dean Stanton
Blue Blood Parsing
∆ Old films
The result of love
Words
The Voice of Lonely Humanity
Gemma Bovary
The girl to be rescued
Sun Moon Jingzhong Paul Scofield ideal type, absolute ideal type
Rosetta
Musgrave Ceremony (1986 episode starring Jeremy Brett)
Prick Up Your Ears (Title Douban Translation????? ）
apartment
THX 1138
Metropolitan mind-blowing experience
A song of opportunity
∆ Short film
(Except for the collage mentioned at the beginning)
scaffold
Origins of the 21st Century: Suggestions and Kieslowski's Interviewee are very interesting intertext.
Beautiful city old things
Set
Lost
Afternoon confusion
You have been in my dreams for so long
Sunday in Beijing
Irrational fear finally —
Still with you. In 2018, without a job, you can always drink the wind and watch movies, but you still want to beat Trump.
(End of full text)
<b>The author of this article, "Lycidas", currently lives in Barcelona, has published 26 original texts and is still active in the Douban community. Download Douban App search users "Lycidas" to follow Ta. </b>