The Blue Angel is a desperate, emotionally unrelenting portrait of a man whose consuming love for a cold, manipulative woman leads to moral descent and ruin. Dr. Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), is a repressed, middle-aged high school professor who decides to confront Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), a cabaret singer, about her “bewitching” of his students. […]
These Encounters of Theirs, 2006
In its exaggerated formalism, idiosyncratic performance, and extended temps morts, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s These Encounters of Theirs is a rigorous and subversively irreverent, but thoughtful, sensual, and articulate meditation on the search for enlightenment, the rapture of divine inspiration, the intranscendable distance of gods, and the elusive quest for immortality. Composed of five […]
A Trip to the Louvre x2, 2004
Resonating in a similar vein as the organically meditative – though less ethereal – cultural elegies of Aleksandr Sokurov (specifically, Elegy of a Voyage and Russian Ark or a stylistically flattened early Alain Resnais art documentary (most notably, Van Gogh and Guernica), A Trip to the Louvre seems on the surface to be devoid of […]
Not Reconciled, or Only Violence Helps Where It Rules, 1965
An early episode of a sacramental canticle recited by a monotonic, impassive chorus (in an oddly surreal scene that fuses home economics and religion) provides an integrally illuminating puzzle piece to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s maddeningly opaque and fragmented, yet abstractly intriguing and curiously resonant film, Not Reconciled: How shall we redeem the world? […]
I Just Didn’t Do It, 2007
On an unassuming morning, a preoccupied young man, Teppei Kaneko (Ryo Kase) irregularly boards an overcrowded train (with the assistance of the station’s white gloved, attendant shover) with his briefcase in hand on his way to a job interview and, while in transit, realizes that his jacket had been caught between the closing doors. Pinned […]
H Story, 2001
Inasmuch as Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour examines the impossibility of translation in articulating the weight of tragedy, Nobuhiro Suwa’s H story also aligns with Arnaud Desplechin’s Playing ‘In the Company of Men’ in illustrating the inherent limitations of adapting source material to convey the essential story. The ambiguity of language is foretold in the […]