Composed as parallel narratives on the status of women in the capitalist-fueled, rapidly expanding economy of contemporary China – one, a fictional account of Li Yueying (Yao Qianyu), a working class young woman and her search for a better life; the other, a documentary on Jenny, a middle-class housewife and mother undergoing a divorce – […]
Julie Talen’s feature-length video, Pretend, is an astonishingly complex experimental visual narrative structure that nevertheless, sustains a cohesive, inner storytelling logic. Composed of a series of dynamically arranged, multi-channel screens, each presenting alternate points of view, imagined scenarios, experiments in color and textual composition, and fragmentation of chronology, the video uses a seemingly simple tale […]
On the 100th anniversary of the Dé family’s watch factory, the third generation owner and company president, Charles (François Simon), is awkwardly (and reluctantly) greeted with a venerated speech delivered by an obliging worker for the benefit of a rolling television camera. Overcome with a sudden bout of anxiety, Charles abruptly retreats for the nearest […]
During an oral dissertation that occurs near the denouement of L’Enfer, the youngest sister Anne (Marie Gillain) is randomly assigned the topic of Euripedes’ Greek tragedy Medea, a mythological character who, betrayed by her husband Jason, exacted revenge by killing their children. The allegory of Medea would prove to be an insightful framework into the […]
The Sacrifice is Andrei Tarkovsky’s final, visually intoxicating and profoundly spiritual masterpiece about the end of the world. The film’s initial image sets the tone for Tarkovsky’s deeply personal statement on humanity’s self-destruction. There is a close-up of a painting depicting an offering (to the haunting, threnodic oratorio of Johann Sebastian Bach). The camera then […]
If the neorealist cinema of Vittorio de Sica and Federico Fellini explored the empirical essence of a man’s primordial soul, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia is the poetic expression of the spiritual soul. Andrei Gortchakov (Oleg Yankovsky), a Russian author, is on an Italian research expedition with his beautiful translator, Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) to retrace the journey […]