Cinema4you2me

Eyimofe (2020) Kristin here: Turning back from documentaries to international art cinema, I’m recommending three films, two from Eastern Europe and one from Nigeria.   Servants (2020) Ivan Ostrochovsky, an established Slovak producer of documentaries, whose first feature  Goat (2015) was successful on the festival circuit, has followed it up with a second. Servants showed in the Encounters program at Berlin and earned enthusiastic reviews ( Variety , Screen Daily ). The film opens with a flashforward as a body is dumped on a dark country road–a scene that will later be replayed when we have more information as to who the victim is. Suddenly a title, “143 days earlier,” appears, and the plot focuses on two beginning seminary students, Juraj and Michal. Briefly we seem to following their personal stories, but their introduction to the seminary routine serves largely as exposition for us. Signs of Communist repression of Catholicism begin to surface. A defiant note an...

Sarita (2019). DB here: Humans love stories, the more the better. As a result, many storytellers find ways to bring distinct story lines together. The most common way is to link them, as subplots involving major characters or their associates. Viktor Shklovsky urged us to think of folktales, novels, and plays as “braided” out of several story lines . At other times, the stories are bracketed within a bigger plot. A character tells others about incidents in childhood, or characters tell completely detachable tales, as Scheherazade and Chaucer’s pilgrims do. Instead of braiding, we get embedding within a frame situation. I started to think again about these options watching four films at the always exhilarating Vancouver International Film Festival . All were engaging, partly because they often mixed comedy and drama in rewarding ways. They also offer a nice menu of creative possibilities, exploited by ambitious filmmakers.   Screen life An omnibus film can offer a frame sto...

Careless Crime (2020) Every September over the last three years, we’ve immensely enjoyed visiting the Venice International Film Festival . There David has participated in the Biennale College Cinema discussions with stimulating colleagues. This year, alas, the coronavirus kept us home. But the festival did make available a selection of fourteen films online . Each could be viewed for five days at the very fair price of $6 per film. ( Here is the array of choices. A few are still available, so hurry.) We took advantage of this opportunity and watched several titles. Here are our thoughts about three of them. (The first section is by David, the second by Kristin.) We hope that if you get a chance to see them on the big screen or at home you’ll investigate.   GOFAC is back! Actually, it never went away The Art of Return (2020). Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s,  I tried to analyze the conventions governing a certain approach to moviemaking, the one that’s come to...

Tiger on Beat (1988). DB here: Simple equipment includes, but is not limited to, knives, pistols, shotguns, ropes tied to shotguns, surfboards, chainsaws, etc. Herewith another attempt to brighten your days with a choice film sequence that never fails to bring a foolish grin to my face. Apologies as ever to Ken Jacobs for my swiping his title . Tiger on Beat (aka, but less pungently,  Tiger on the Beat , 1988) is prime Hong Kong showboating. This final scene assembles some of the greats—Chow Yun-Fat, Gordon Liu Chia-Hui, Chu Siu-Tung (too little to do)–and near-greats like Conan Lee Yuen-Ba, who gets points for heedlessly executing the stunts Chow and Chow’s doubles can’t. Lau Kar-Leung (aka Liu Chia-Liang), one of Hong Kong’s finest directors, imbues both the staging and the editing with the crisp, staccato rhythm that this tradition made its own, and that few American directors have ever figured out. Come to think of it, this little-stabs entry contains some fairly big s...

The Fugitive (1993). DB here: How do we respond to films? How are they designed to have effects on us? How do our responses outrun the “programmed” effects filmmakers aim to create? These are perennial questions of film studies. Since the 1990s, neuroscientists have tried mapping our brains’ reactions to moving images, and one school of thought in that tradition has sought answers in the phenomenon of mirror neurons. In my spring seminar, I tried to introduce students to a bit of this debate. First I laid out what I’ve taken to be the most useful psychological findings for my research–what has been known as “classic cognitivism,” stemming from the New Look psychology of the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time I wanted the group to consider alternative theories, and the timing of the book The Empathic Screen , by Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra, seemed propitious. In addition, I learned of Malcolm Turvey’s response to their research and brought that essay to the seminar. For so...