There is an ominous, impressionistic cadence to Werner Herzog’s The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser: an obscured man in a rowboat, a woman rubbing clothes against a washboard, the sound of warbled music from a warped phonograph record. A brief, incidental foreword chronicles Kaspar Hauser’s mysterious appearance in a Nuremberg town square one Sunday morning in […]
Aguirre: The Wrath of God opens with an astonishing landscape shot of a mountain side in the heart of the Amazon jungle. Images of men, reduced to size of imperceptible dots, descend along the precariously steep trail, briefly disappear into the horizon, and reemerge into the foreground of another mountain. It is late 1560, and […]
In the book Alain Resnais, author James Monaco cites a comment by the filmmaker on Last Year at Marienbad that his idea for the film was to “renew a certain style of the silent cinema”, for which Monaco expounds that this overarching vision contributed to the film’s multifaceted syntax that “any particular shot can be […]
A lumbering, full-grown pig, muzzled through a leash that has been tied around its snout, is led outside the barnyard doors of an unidentified farm and into a clearing where a group of apparent bystanders cavalierly await its slaughter. The skittish, herky-jerky video image taken from the handheld camera moves in relatively tight side view […]
A faceless and unassuming family waits in oppressive silence, passively watching the rhythmic, mechanized motion of detergent sprays, high pressure washers, and rotating brushes as their vehicle travels through the monotonous cleaning cycles of a car wash before driving away, past the idyllic coastal image of a billboard advertisement for Australian tourism. The drudgery and […]
Converging towards Kobo Abe’s experimental fiction in its fragmented examination of the strange phenomenon of johatsu – the unexplained (and presumably self-initiated) disappearances of otherwise seemingly responsible and professional salarymen in metropolitan Tokyo – as a broader social symptom of the anonymization and erasure of identity inherent in urbanization and rigid cultural conformity (most notably, […]