Antichirist film is marred by the genius of its director. The story and filming had yet started on the wheel cover, a plastic beauty and extraordinary visual emerged from the first images of the film. A couple, a man and a woman, filmed in slow motion black and white on the background music of Handel, make love in a bathroom while their children, left to himself, leaves his room and throws herself from a window. The first pictures are beautiful by the contrast they operate: contrast between the ground and fast cutting, dry the plans, the camera upside down, and slow slow motion contrast between the clinical, hygienic, lay the place where the couple made love, the white bath, and the lyricism of the music seems to transport us in a time metaphysical and archetypal. Contrast between the horizontal planes of the couple copulating, knocked on their washing machine, and the verticality of the fall of the child, caught up, absorbed by the vacuum. The extreme stylization of staging this incipit in the film returns the viewer to a kind of original image, a prelude to a dive into the depths of the unconscious. However, the early images is a problem, that ruins the already visual pleasure: the parallel arrangement between the couple making love and the child who dies establishes a causal relationship between these two phenomena, love and death already specifies the themes of guilt, placed in a Judeo-Christian cultural reference is too obvious not to be suspicious. The filmmaker has already placed his characters in a straitjacket symbolic too dogmatic, encloses them in orbit omniscient, guilt, overhanging the eye of the camera. The themes of Eros and Thanatos, copulation and fall, original sin, are therefore the engine of the film and the script, and will release the film in their sanctimonious poison. After this successful opening stylistically and thematically disturbing, the filmmaker confronts us with the couple trying to survive the death of the child and live with the feeling of guilt. She (Charlotte Gainsbourg, absolutely amazing) is taken from various phobias, she is delirious with pain and overwhelming, totally uncontrollable; Him cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist trend, trying to help him through various exercises (Breath control; confrontation with images that scare, etc.). To stem the forces of the unconscious mind working and being with his wife, he believes good to take him to Eden, a place in the forest where the couple had once known happiness with her child, to compare it with the images of his past and so to defuse, he believes, with the optimism of scientific positivism irritating. But things were different: Eden, evil forces are unleashed, as the fevered imagination is unleashed, morbid, disgusting a filmmaker who does not know where give head in the trash ideological and symbolic repository where it becomes entangled. In fact, what is problematic in the film is that the filmmaker as much as his characters are experiencing delusional tendencies. The film deals with a heavy symbolic load of different topics, assembled and stacked on each other in a heap indigestible: it fuses a bazaar of psychoanalysis, which we do not know ultimately if it is part of Freud and Jung Both the filmmaker tangled brushes in various thematic references to psychoanalysis (and the collective unconscious and archetypal themes, Flights animist symbolism Jung and the presence of residues such as Freudian sexuality as an engine of individual neuroses), a Judeo-Christian themes, nonsensical, mixing imagery of Christ, witchcraft, symbols of cross, the wheel of torture, etc.; imaging naturalist and conservationist, with talking animals, a nature that the filmmaker wants noisy presence but makes it loud and thumping. In sum, the "Chaos reigns, not in external and internal nature, as suggested by the talking fox in the film (snicker play that made a lot of people in the room as she was grotesque) but in the spirit of Lars Van Trier. Then, the mixture of genres is equally confusing and clumsy as the various cultural and symbolic rear bottom of which the film is overloaded. The first part is rather Bergmanesque, replaying the confrontation between the couple and tearing it generates, with the successful clinical differences between the reactions of men and women cope with pain (a little cliche anyway, but good), then it veers more towards a trend tarkovskienne, when the two characters go to Eden to discover the natural forces that are in them, just how Solaris by the end, the film turns to outright horror and gore, it is also weak and without substance "massacre in Transcona, claim intellectual and artistic as well. At the end of the film, the viewer leaves leached by both chaotic and ugly images, stunned by the symbolic marking of the filmmaker.
dark Village in Poland, a village bumpkin and taciturn, Okrasa Leon falls in love with a nurse seated in front of his house and he had been accused 4 years ago wrongly, to have violated. In this frame both poetic and realistic, the filmmaker weaves a story of extreme delicacy and refinement of extreme tenderness for his characters immersed in a world of sinister and violent. We live in a universe near Keslowski Pialat and, closer to the bitterness of men and landscapes, as close as love, conversion, redemption. We follow the path that makes every night Okrasa to enter the room of the woman he had long contemplated his filthy barn, this same woman who had plunged, unwittingly, in prison violence and absurd horror his accusation. The film is made, we suspect, this dialectic of opposing worlds: an opposition between the world's violence in which two living beings who have suffered in the flesh breaking into their privacy, these landscapes of violence claims, bleak, as survivors of a disaster that has banished all tenderness, all sweetness and landscapes of the soul. Thus there are two worlds in the movie: the scenery, the daylight, which seems to throw light on the dirty world of a long winter, the buildings are former kolkhoz, dripping with grime as sprung from the dark night of primitive humanity and surviving the barbed wire that surround the homes, the poverty of these wetlands and dilapidated barns, contending the presence of objects, and in the midst of all this, Anna's room, another universe in which the character of Leon as she plunges asleep, stunned by the sleeping powder that has slipped into his box of sugar. We meet with him, this man rough and hurt, in a kind of lush sweetness: the objects in it and was strongly contrasted with the usual universe of male character: everything is feminine, a quilt on which he lays his cheek, in a perfectly round and shiny of its luster of flesh in the night, he stroked a cat and with whom he even tried to dance, a Swiss clock, a manicure with which he coated the fingers of this beloved woman while she sleeps. In one of the most beautiful scenes of the film, we see Okrasa during the third night, he is inside the room and suddenly a tremendous uproar takes place, the crashing noise of a helicopter emerged from nowhere, the shrill sirens, all this aggressive sound of the police. Anna wakes up and Okrasa hiding, it does not seem to realize what was happening outside, she is too stunned to ask questions. It will then wash your face at the sink and there she discovers that the diamond ring lovesick had bought for her with his severance pay. She contemplates the ring length, then returns to bed, still impervious to the deafening noise outside, fully object-oriented for it arose from nothing overnight. Skolimowski embroider at will on the opposition of the beast and the beauty, the sweetness and violence, beauty and ugliness, darkness and brightness: In another scene, we see that pours Okrasa sugar in his coffee or tea, he put two spoon, but after a look pensive and tender, it adds another to imitate his sweetheart who is used to put three in his cup. Mimetic gesture that plunges us into silence in the soul of this taciturn man in the depths of tenderness and humanity it contains. The film is also at the junction of social realism and universal tale. The filmmaker because his film in a very material, very accurately marked: these barns, these dilapidated houses and the whole village is the survival of the communist world, as are former collective farms mostly recycled administrative centers or hospital as one where Anna works. There is in the film chronicles the post-communist Poland, where some misery reign, which seems to be left outside of modernity, as absent the course of history. It seems that all these people remained in the same prison world in which communism had locked up. Indeed, the very last frame of the film is that of a wall. The wall is still there, the filmmaker seems to scream, but its borders have changed, they are no longer that of the East and West, nor those of capitalism and communism, they are inside land, spirits, social lines. Yet this social chronicle of the new Poland is also a universal tale, which certainly fits in the materiality and contingency of space-time social framework, while referring to something more abstract. Everything seems to arise rather sinister village in the Middle Ages, the main character is the incarnation at the beginning of the film, the figure of the hideous monster, it looks like a tidal wave of humanity consciousness, one of those Dickensian in which Men bear the traces of their downfall. The director would also have border on cliche, as its universe of aesthetic connotations and marked social, but he avoids black humor very squeaky, by its reliance on findings of scenarios both sinister and funny, by way of subverting the anxious expectation of the viewer.
Rarely has a film looked like provided that "The Sparrow" to the expression of "Film-world" including Serge Daney described some films that had this characteristic to embrace reality in all its complexity. This expression was twofold: first, to affirm the autonomy of cinema in relation to any evidence which is external, whether social, political or cultural. Secondly, and this is a much more problematic, asserting the supremacy of film to reality, aesthetic and ontological supremacy, because it is an indivisible whole which overlaps in some ways from reality, which cancels in the duplicates, which gives a comprehensive interpretation and reduced to its essence. Serge Daney was even talk of home cinema, which would be a habitable world, because it contains all the elements necessary for self-sufficiency of the individual: the spectacle of reality magnified, both deconstructed and hyper constructed diverse and yet united by deeply the eyes of a creator. The vision of the Sparrow refers to the totalizing conception of cinema. One feels that sense of every way of the cinema a reality heterogeneous and confused, to represent the multiplicity of individual trajectories, this incessant proliferation of life into a painting overall.
Indeed, it has criticized the Chahine confused nature of the narrative, both in the House Sparrow and many other films that follow the same structure, that of a multiplicity of trajectories and evolving characters to a critical moment in our collective history. Indeed, mounting hit, the story unraveled and as popcorn, the flickering of the film almost physical sense of the historical individual logic may probably disrupt the aesthetic appreciation of the Sparrow. However, this apparent confusion only highlights deeper the foundation of the film: the prevalence the trajectory of individual characters, inextricably woven into the fabric of general history, and yet irreducible to it. For what is the value of Chahine, it's still his deep perception of human depth and more of that crowd of people who are found involved in some stage of their lives to national events or world while maintaining their inner thoughts, their doubts, their hopes and their doldrums. What is most striking about this movie is Chahine's way of undermining the very foundations of his film, confusing the audience by thwarting a systematically their expectations.
In Sparrow, the profession of faith of the film, announced at the pre-credits, is the analysis of socio-political reasons for the collapse of the Egyptian army during the War of the six days in 1967. His thesis is clear, clear, one might even say simplistic: the rout of the Egyptian troops was caused by gangrene, corruption and lies that plague the upper echelons of power. The entire film is structured by the parallelism between Egyptian troops preparing to fight against an external enemy, Israel, and the main characters who confront them with an enemy within. However, the structure elusive, almost elusive narrative, this logic phagocyte ever realistic. If we compare the film to the model Chahine films political activists of the 70s, we realize that these films often have a characteristic of both narrative and stylistic analysis and reporting of actions require underground power editing and narrative structure of type record, where each and every event plan is to serve the general thesis of the film. In the structure linear character of the film plus the one-dimensional character that serves as an indicator of corruption or bases of power. The establishment of the general context flange and any singularity of the character who becomes the instrument of a demonstration. The Sparrow is the opposite of that system. Although the willingness of the filmmaker is in the tradition of political films that attempt to explain and analyze why a particular social or political event, and although the general context, that of the days that preceded the defeat of 67 is pervasive, the film has a structure singular, which makes it difficult to grasp or clamp in a single dimension. Mounting especially dismantles this profession of faith of the political film: it is not fitting analytic, where each segment and each plan contributing to building a coherent set of events. It is instead a montage hatched hit, broken, sometimes even incomprehensible to those who viewed the movie for the first time. Temporality is often abruptly disrupted, the flashbacks are inserted as monstrous growths, the sequence of events is punctuated by sudden surges of narrative digressions, moments of pause or suspension action. One might wonder what happens to the story that its structure is thus defeated. I think the explanations are manifold: they arise from reasons both external and internal to the narrative. External because Chahine seems to bring on a stylistic break in the Arab consciousness during the defeat of 67. It is the abandonment of an entire society that the film translated and wife, so its structure is like this shattered society, breathless with so many deceptions and lies, panting and looking for truth long hidden. The second reason is internal to the film foundation. Indeed, the main characters, especially Rauf, are seeking a truth that all others strive to hide. They are sometimes lost in this labyrinth of lies woven by power, and are facing the gulf that separates truth from falsehood, fact from fiction and reality from fiction. This is all the more striking that the character of Raoul is not only seeking the truth in politics but also seeks the truth about his origins. The assembly thus reflects this kind of vague discomfort and disorientation experienced by characters, like a premonition of approaching defeat. From this angle, the film could even be considered a documentary that captures the deleterious atmosphere reigned in the streets and minds in Egypt a few days before the defeat of 67, generated by the delay, the mad hope and yet pathetic, and fever bubbling above the storms.
The first images of the film already announced the malaise of the hero and with him the whole society: Raouf and Riad, son of the chief of police, leaving each to one front: the one against the external enemy, Israel, the other to a remote village in southern Egypt to try to neutralize Abu Khedhri, a bandit accused of stealing the machines installed in a refinery to boost the economy of the village and who is able to reign terror unspeakable and heavy atmosphere. From the first images, the heroic epic of the two characters on the threshold of their house is riddled from within by some false reports between Raoul and his parents, a background concern and discomfort emerge from this shift in family relationships, the characters are planted in front of one another, rigid, tense, and as separated by a distance as irreducible invisible. Already, the undermining of the figure of the hero started, already national unity represented by the family disintegrates, bloated from the inside by gangrene and deep underground. This discrepancy between fact and perception, between actions and their explanation and deeper between the main character and the logic state is increasing throughout the film. Arriving in the village, the character runs into the code of silence and closed and inscrutable faces of the villagers. It sat in the dust and at that time still seems to condemn the emptiness and waiting. Something missing from his reading of events. The official version does not stick, something gnaws from within. But then came Youssef, the character of the journalist, who delivers a new and different story, namely that the villain in question is the victim in the senior ranks of power, who handled pushing the machines to steal. The intervention of the character Youssef is a tilting moment of the film. If Chahine had content to reveal the false, manipulative and opaque in power, his film would have been a yet another stone in the pond and would have had an interest in film, if not historical, relative. However, at the onset Youssef, new connections are taking place, a new thickness appears in the relationships between the characters. That's what usually makes the value of films Chahine: Whatever the shackles which enclose initially, the character manages to generate a force of will Promethean, and conquered this part of individual freedom and breathing that result in escape lyric at odds with the strict grid beginning of the film. As as Raouf discovers the truth not only political but also the traffic on himself and his origins, he enters a new community, whose central character is of Bahia, both mother and pasionaria, muse and shelter, one of those characters generous woman with a big heart like Egypt and extends his protection and grace on all who approach.
Here's the fauna and human proliferating pathetic observed under the microscope of Chahine. As the scenario that may seem disjointed at first, the relationships between the characters are struck with a high coefficient of improbability. The friendship between Sheikh Ahmed, a little rustic villagers, who came all the way from his village in southern Egypt, Youssef, idealistic journalist who sacrifices any family or personal search for the truth, Raouf the atypical cop, the son of a musician who committed suicide and whose theme song until the end of the film structure the narrative and give his life to patriotic and tragic, Bahia finally, character without a doubt the most poignant film, both mother, friend, lover and fighter. This friendship might at first seem quite unbelievable, was the deep humanity that Chahine invests each of his characters in his own way to discover, beyond appearances, a profound correspondence between human beings.
The relationship between the individual stories and the overall context of the Six Day War is also confusing in the film. In the pre-generic Chahine announced have designed the film to explain the reasons for the defeat, to give to the poor Egyptian people, humble and cheated, explanations of political and social reasons that led to the Naksa, the catastrophe of 67. The filmmaker was therefore initially pedagogical intentions. However, Chahine maliciously likes to blur the lines: the war against Israel is perceived as a fragmented manner, and gradually as the story advances, it becomes very secondary. Some news from the front reaches the characters in the form of letters or mental images, some concern can be seen in the faces, sometimes means the radio broadcast patriotic songs, but that's all. The reference to the general context of the war against Israel is almost erased the image, and a spectator who come from another planet and would not know beforehand the general context probably could not understand what happened during those few days. Everything happens as if Chahine liked to constantly engulf the very logic of his film. The investigation into the reasons for the defeat of 67 is replaced by a quasi-police investigation on flights factory in a village lost in southern Egypt. The character trivial and ridiculous of this survey is quite confusing. It continues to be taken from a growing unease throughout the film: where are the images of war that hides the politicians who planned it, the soldiers who were unable to conduct the people she has destroyed? The image of this war constantly eludes us, it seems that the characters and with them the whole society have forgotten that they got lost in deceptive research. Only in the last frame as the brutal and shocking return of reality has hit the characters. Latest sequences of the film could also be likened to what is called return of the repressed. Reality forgotten, repressed, relegated to second place, again suddenly surface. In the latest plan, the truth is finally discovered: Egypt lost the war. Any official propaganda was a big lie, like everything else besides, as these flights factory, these crimes feud between villagers, such as family relationships. Something fatal was played without the knowledge of the characters, something they could not grasp the stakes.
The last sequence Film: Bahia hand deliver a neighbor who is expecting her umpteenth child, she probably stay there all night, with Fatma Rauf is still taking trucks from thieves legitimate, "Youssef is fighting for the newspaper to publish an article. At dawn, when Bahya returns to her home, she finds Youssef, slouched on a chair, his haggard face and as distorted by pain, unrecognizable. What happened? The new, overwhelming, incomprehensible, unimpeachable, fell on all the characters. They meet in front of the television to listen to the speeches of Nasser who announced his resignation. A close up on TV and on the face of Nasser, who delivers his speech in a flat voice, then successive shots on the various characters who seem dazed by the news. In this last sequence, we feel that this sense of unease underground, this vague uneasiness, this frantic and fruitless search, finally find their enlightenment in a final speech.
What happened? Chahine really not trying to answer this question. It stands rather the finding of gangrene that eats away at society. But his film does not stop there. The intercutting and sometimes confrontation between the individual history and collective history, the multiplicity of trajectories, reflecting on the reasons for the defeat compose a kind of puzzle, which is gradually established. But this puzzle helps to reveal the most popular of these action figures that give a definitive explanation for the defeat.
A filmmaker Nobuhiro Suwa decides to film his hometown , Hiroshima, to the remake of another film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain RENAIS. That Beatrice DALLE chosen to play the role played by Emmanuelle RIVA. In this remake, an experimental film comes very dense in its design and content, which reveals both a lot about modern cinema and how to capture not only the history but in general the history of cinema in particular, on how to film the scene, bodies and faces. In fact a remake, the director gives a very personal tone to his film. Because it is more of a remake of Hiroshima Mon Amour, but to film a filmmaker and his actors doing the remake of this film. The filming process and device of staging, shooting, directing actors, are the subject of diegetic film.
In fact, the entire film takes us into a kind of vertigo of staging, where different devices are entangled, stand out, multiply indefinitely, putting us in front of a palimpsest composed of different scripts in the film. First is the real scene remake of Hiroshima mon amour, those where we see Dallas and other major player repeat the same scenes RENAIS on dialogues of Marguerite Duras. Then there is the real film sets, shooting scenes false (false because the director makes us believe that this is a true making off without staging, so that only the staging of a fake making off) the real scenes SLAB playing herself and another actor walking the streets of Hiroshima, false scenes of crisis within team, etc.. Adjectives true and false draw here a line of boundary between the artificiality of fiction and over-artificiality of filming fiction. They put the viewer in front of an interlocking staggering staging, different diegetic levels, which seem to build up and reduce the perception of reality and the filmed subject of the film, that is to say Hiroshima itself. But the brilliance of the staging is not just an exercise in style, because by interposing between the subject of the film and the audience the device of cinema, the filmmaker joins the truth or reality in another way, many stronger and more poignant.
It is also true to the spirit of the original film. RENAIS because no method other than by a diversion of the gaze. The sentence punctuated Hiroshima mon amour, "You saw nothing in Hiroshima", meant the inability to actually see the horror that defies classification, the character and put the viewer in front of this aporia of view and therefore make sense, trying to maintain healthy distance between horror and perception, not to transform it into a spectacle. Only through love and singular focus on two bodies that can penetrate the meaning of what happened in Hiroshima is possible. Because the two bodies so alive, so beautiful Emmanuelle Riva and her lover of Japan, the grain of their skin that fills the screen from the first frame of film can only refer to all other hollow body disappeared, all beings buried under the dust radioactive, all the flesh burned in one fatal moment. The dialogues and purified by Marguerite Duras obsessive also allowed to lead the viewer into a bewitching rhythm, a kind of litany of memory and pain, a kind of magical incantation where every word uttered, whispered in the privacy of love opposing the prevailing discourse of lamentation and commemoration. Hiroshima, Nevers, the names of these two cities strangely mark the viewer's memory, because it does not mean only the geography of the horror but the topography of the intimate unhappiness. Both cities made face-to-face through cinema, with no hierarchy between them except that of telescoping of memory and personal experience of human tragedy.
face of this diversion of the gaze and to shift the direction established by CGS and RENAIS, SUWA had to invent his own method to capture a reality overused and even more elusive than 40 years passed between the two films. In my opinion, he did brilliantly in marrying also the aesthetics of postmodern cinema. If the modern cinema, including Hiroshima Mon Amour was one of the key moments, was characterized by the de-framing, deconstruction, the willingness to fight the perception of reality too directly by shifts aesthetic, postmodern cinema is characterized by about -frames, the interlocking levels of staging, setting abyss of the cinema by the revelation of the shooting device. Abbas Kiarostami is one of the leaders of this trend. From Close Up to Ten, it has continued to develop its own abyss movie by revealing its mechanisms, by blurring the lines between the false and true shooting, by putting himself on stage. In the case of SUWA, this surcadrage, this staging in the staging, the true-false film that is more of a remake is in fact a reflection film of saturation of meaning and images of modern Hiroshima and beyond, all the wars and the abomination that they generate. In a beautiful scene of the film, the actress Beatrice DALLE (Dalle I say the actress when she plays the role of film actress Dalle H Story and Dalle's character when she plays the role of Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima mon love) a visit modern museum housing works on Hiroshima. While the museum guide explains the companion SLAB meaning of these abstract works, kind of fitting geometric scholar and superfluous, SLAB turns and walks away into the depth of field. Purified in a single sequence, the filmmaker refuses any talk of Hiroshima, any direct attempt to seize it by means of art or worse, the discourse on art. He prefers to put the viewer in front of vertigo staging, in which the names of Hiroshima, is rarely spoken yet ubiquitous. Because we constantly ask: Where is Hiroshima what do we see this city once battered, what happens to its people? Only in the last scenes of the film we see another actor SLAB and wander the streets of this modern city, which seems to bear no trace of the massacre. Instead, many young people play music, a band of merry thieves will celebrate life, this city might be New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sao Paolo ... So, between this story so remote in time, the city who survives him and the audience, the filmmaker's body interposed Beatrice DALLE and his own body (as SUWA is also a character in the film). If the film has resonance with a distant history Hiroshima, it helps to consider the issue of representation in cinema, through the acting, light, sounds and movements. By overflow of fireworks, he takes us into the essence of cinema which is neither a treaty in history, nor a photo story, or a sociological analysis of a drama. Suwa does indeed offer no alternative definition, but its editing, its slow tracking shots through the corridors of the hotel where the team filmed the remake, some care in the filming which is far from a pose, stylization extreme scenes, reveals negative in a proposed film, a concentrated essence of modern reality it reveals the presence of things that depicts, and often it is the body that operates presence. By putting the body of Beatrice DALLE the center of his filming, the director has bet on the alchemy that occurs between the body and actual film, he gambled that SLAB reveal superimposed another thing that showed Emmanuelle Riva. Gamble taken as something else absorbs SLAB, reflects light in a different way. Tattoo on his right shoulder blade, its angular body and its presence both sensual and unsettling, the way he put his large eyes on a person, a reality, the languor of his speech, his actions and intense, are the subject of the film, give it its power and its beauty. But beyond its purely physical characteristic is his very being as the filmmaker confronts his film. Vampire filmmaker, he makes a recording of that power to him specifically, a catchment so strong that it seems out of the bloodless shooting.
