APPLAUSE
***
ARSENAL
*****
Life in Ukraine leading up to
the Bolshevik revolution.
Episodic propaganda, marred by some supremely cheesy intertitles that
don't even restrain the patriotic spirit from the horses. It serves as
testament to the film's power and otherwise peerless crafting that it
still retains its transfixing impact and emotional resonance.
wr/dir/ed: Alexander Dovzhenko
ph: Daniil Demutsky
cast: Semyon Svashenko, Amvrosi Buchma, Georgi Khorkov, Dmitri
Erdman, Sergei Petrov
BLACKMAIL
****
UN
CHIEN ANDALOU
***½
France
When Luis Buñuel notoriously stated that his and Salvador Dali's landmark
mindfuck was supposed to mean 'nothing', he was lying. If anything, their
purposefully grotesque, seemingly disjointed imagery is overloaded with
meaning (a bachelor dragging a burden of bishops on his back, the
just-married couple buried waist-deep in sand at springtime? unsubtle, if
anything), and it isn't necessarily worth sifting through the tomes and
tomes of dense and inevitably pretentious theses and dissertations to dig
it up in full. Take in the unsurpassed visceral impact of the slicing of the eye, marvel at a few
other images such as the one with the rotting donkey on the piano, and
don't get overwhelmed in the undergrad art-wank adulation routinely
bestowed upon Buñuel and Dali's crudely photographed and edited undergrad
art-wankery. They each (and Buñuel in particular) went on to bigger and
better things, much more deserving of your time and consideration.
wr/dir: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali
cast: Pierre Batcheff, Simone Mareuil, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali,
Robert Hommet, Marval, Fano Messan, Jaime Miravilles
THE COCOANUTS
***½
MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
*****
USSR
Certainly the most famous of Dziga Vertov's sensory onslaughts and
probably the most exciting. It's similar to the 'Symphonies' of the period
(to Berlin, Paris etc.) in that it's a consummately crafted, endlessly
fascinating document of a time and place (or places - namely Odessa,
Moscow and Kiev); though Vertov is much more interested than Rutmann &
co. in documenting the cunning and the allure of the movie camera and its
romancing of the cinemagoer. He employs all sorts of visual trickery -
split-screen, superimpositions, stop-motion, slow-motion, fast-motion,
super-fast-motion - though even at its barest and most organic, his
imagery is stunning.
wr/dir: Dziga Vertov
ph: Mikhail Kaufman
ed: Yelizaveta Svilova
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THE NEW BABYLON
***
USSR
The rise and fall of the Paris Commune in 1871.
Loosely based on a couple of novels by Zola, this is certainly
competently crafted propaganda - with a satiric edge even - but it's
neither involving nor memorable.
dir:
Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg
cast: David Gutman, Yelena Kuzmina, Andrei Kostrichkin, Sofya
Magarill
PANDORA'S BOX
***½
QUEEN KELLY
**
USA
The queen's fiancé falls for a
convent girl.
Swanson the diva fired Von Stroheim from this picture (which was his last
great folly) and it was never finished. The surviving prints make you side
with Swanson - it's tough enough to sit through what's already there. Basically,
no kind of lavish set decoration or kinky overtones could compensate for
trashy melodrama needlessly and endlessly drawn out. Extracts from this
are what Norma Desmond shows her lover in "Sunset Boulevard"
(1950). It exists in at least two versions.
dir: Erich von Stroheim
cast: Gloria Swanson, Walter Byron, Seena Owen
TURKSIB
*****
USSR
A little-seen, phenomenally crafted documentary account of the development of a railway line between Siberia
and Turkestan. Even if the intention may be exactly the opposite, there is
a constant undercurrent to the startlingly gorgeous imagery (ranging from a camel caravan caught in a sandstorm to a tribe of
nomads first laying eyes upon modern machinery) of man continually
underestimating the vastness and timelessness of time and human progress
registering as something moderately insignificant in the greater scheme of
the universe.
dir/ed: Victor Turin
ph: Boris Frantsisson, Yevgeni Slavinsky
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