Delirium (aka Photos of Gioia) [Lamberto Bava, 1987]:
Watched: Jun 17, 2019
The film is tasteless, without question. An apparently
shallow slasher movie full of the usual scenes of women in peril,
knife-wielding assailants and over-the-top twists. However, it contains so many
elements that I enjoy in movies that I couldn't help being held captive by the
experience of it. The giallo sub-genre is one that I have a great affinity for.
Even when the films are flawed or middling, I can usually find something in the
subtext or execution that elevates the whole experience. In Delirium, the
setting, the world of publishing and glamour photography, gives the film a context
to explore ideas relating to voyeurism, objectification, desire, obsession and
representation. Self-reflexive themes that have characterized the best giallo
movies since Dario Argento's landmark debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
(1970), and its debts to both Rear Window (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock and
Blow-Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni. Delirium isn't as great as those
earlier works, but it does at least attempt to provide a meta-commentary on the
world of the film. Its emphasis on surfaces and appearance, its world of
privilege and affluence and its luxury villas hidden behind the gated suburbs
of Rome, make sense on a narrative and presentational level, but they also underpin
what the genre is about; chiefly, style and excess. While not as cohesive or
coherent as Bava's earlier film, the superior but controversial A Blade in the
Dark (1983), nor as shamelessly pulpy as his no-less self-reflexive Demons
(1985) and its sequel Demons 2 (1986), Delirium satisfied my expectations. The
atmosphere throughout was redolent, the plot random but engaging, and the
set-pieces genuinely thrilling.
The Blackout [Abel Ferrara, 1997]:
Watched: Jun 25, 2019
Like many of the films of Abel Ferrara, The Blackout
is intentionally messy. Ferrara isn't a filmmaker looking for perfection. He
doesn't want the edges to be neat, but frayed and disheveled, allowing the
whole thing to unravel and leave the audience feeling confused and disoriented.
His protagonists are frequently intoxicated, high on booze and pills, smoking
cigarettes and marijuana, speeding on whizz, and the experience of the film
becomes as dizzying for the audience as it is for the characters on screen.
Scenes lurch and stumble into one another as if assembled at random, or as if
significant events have been removed and reshuffled. Characters come and go in
a haze, rambling, incoherent, revealing everything and nothing, becoming guides
to a neon-lit underworld of drugs and illicit sex, or becoming victims, willing
or otherwise. To the casual observer the experience can become alienating, as
the audience is thrown into scenes without context, unable to relate to its
characters, decadent, violent and unlikable as they often appear. However,
there's a method to Ferrara's madness, as The Blackout is a film that's felt
as much as it is viewed. Like the director's later film, the vaguely futurist
and entirely prescient William Gibson cyberpunk adaptation New Rose Hotel
(1999), The Blackout is a hermetic, claustrophobic film about a character
effectively imprisoned by their own memories and attempting to piece together
the wreckage of their own existence through an investigation into these
memories. Ferrara again ties the psychology of the character into a
dissertation on images; with Dennis Hopper's mad videographer becoming a kind
of Mephisto figure, the devil's agent who calls in the debt owed by the central
character's burnt-out Faust. That the protagonist is an actor is significant as
the film becomes about the nature of cinema – acting and reacting, faking
things that can't be felt – and where the nightclub central to the narrative
becomes both a subconscious space and stand-in for hell; the Inferno, after
Dante, as a video installation.
A Master Builder [Jonathan Demme, 2013]:
Watched: Jun 29, 2019
Having mastered the live concert film with the
legendary Stop Making Sense (1985) and the spoken-word monologue with Swimming
to Cambodia (1987), director Jonathan Demme turns his attention to another
theatrical standard, the "filmed play." This is how many writers have
categorized Demme's A Master Builder, though in truth the term is contentious
and incorrect. While the film, a somewhat modernized adaptation, or
interpretation, of Henrik Ibsen's 1892 play "The Master Builder",
maintains the claustrophobic setting, the heightened or exaggerated performance
style, and the feeling of unreality created by the engagement of intentional
artificiality that defines the theatre-going experience, the film is not
a recording of a live event, but a motion picture that has been shaped and
directed for cinematic engagement. The composition of shots, the choice of
lens, the use of close-ups and subtle effects work, the changes in lighting and
the associations created by the cutting between scenes and images, are done
with purpose and intent. That the film is defined by sequences of characters
sitting or pacing around sparsely furnished rooms speaking in long, poetic but
expositional dialogues doesn't make the film "uncinematic." The notion that the first rule of cinema is
"show don't tell" is horse shit, as in the cinema even the telling is
shown. What is cinematic and brilliant about A Master Builder is the power of
performance; actors expressing, reacting; telling a story with their voices and
facial expressions writ large across the screen. Then merge with the power of
the written word as translated into spoken dialog; invested with emotion and room
enough for the things left unsaid. These virtues become the film's
"special effects." The spectacle of human drama as presented here is more
thrilling and innately cinematic than any gritty street drama or act of CGI
exhibitionism currently seen at festivals or award shows.
Gerry [Gus Van Sant, 2002]:
Watched: Jul 03, 2019
Every so often, director Gus Van Sant makes a movie
that convinces me he's the best American filmmaker of his generation. Gerry is
one such film. Dispensing with the conventions of plot, backstory and
characterisation, Gerry is a work that finds drama in a changing landscape; the
physiognomy of the rocks, the desert sands and the vast oceans of sky, each
interceding on behalf of actors that are made small and insignificant by the
world around them. In conventional terms, its plot can be surmised in a single
sentence: having driven to a remote part of the desert, two friends set-off
to explore a wilderness trail by foot, get lost, and attempting to find their
way back to civilization, go off the rails. But the experience of the film
goes much deeper than this brief summation would suggest. Taking influence from
Chantal Akerman's "slow-cinema" masterwork Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du
Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and the then-recent films of Béla Tarr and
Ágnes Hranitzky, such as Sátántangó (1994), Gerry is a masterpiece of mood and
meditation. While actors and co-writers Matt Damon and Casey Affleck do well
with their minimal performances, their blank state and restrained emotions
suggesting the quiet resolve of two people facing but refusing to accept the
hopelessness of their situation, it's nonetheless a film where the prolonged
movement of actors wandering aimless towards oblivion, becomes more thrilling
than an action set-piece. The trance-like nature of the actors on-screen is in
synch with the endlessly drifting camera, the spare soundtrack with its repetitive
rhythm of footsteps on dry sand, of deep breaths and the whistling wind. It
creates the impression of something almost ambient; a figurative black mirror
that the audience experiences but is then free to project onto it their own
thoughts, feelings and motivations.
The Belly of an Architect [Peter Greenaway, 1987]:
Watched: Aug 04, 2019
The general perception of the work of Peter Greenaway
is of something rigorous and academic; something that's devoid of the warmth
and emotion that audiences anticipate when they sit down to watch a film. For
many audiences and critics, the cinema, as a medium, has become synonymous with
escapism and "storytelling." For Greenaway, who once said the avant-garde
visual installations of filmmaker Bill Viola were "worth ten Martin
Scorsese's", and who ranks the mysterious Last Year at Marienbad (1961) as
his favourite film, the cinema is something else. Structured around lists and
numerical strategies, with visual guides and puns woven into the ornate mise-en-scène,
the films reduce characters to intellectual or political representations, and
position them around a kind of heavily manipulative and deconstructive theatre
of cruelty that makes the viewing audience complicit in events. While this can
be challenging and even alienating for viewers, I've always felt Greenaway's
best films do contain an element of human engagement and identification. They
may be ironic in presentation and allergic to notions of melodrama, but they
still engage with recognizable themes of guilt, grief, pride and failure. This
is certainly true of the film in question, which strikes me as Greenaway's most
human film, as well as his most moving. Anchoring his usual decorative
stylisation to a genuine character study, the film is less engaged in his usual
Brechtian distancing and ironic detachment. Instead, it becomes a study in
contrasts between cultures, the past and the present, but more significantly
the contrast between the permanence of art and architecture against the
fragility and finality of the human body.
