belladonna of sadness (1973)

A word can always evoke everything that can be associated with it in one way or another.

camille (1936)

We do not process information in a neutral way.

the girlfriend experience (2009)

love is a many-splendored thing (1955)

play time (1967)

So ease or indigence depend on each man’s opinion: wealth, fame, and health all have no more beauty and pleasure than he who has them lends to them. For each man good or ill is as he finds. The man who is happy is not he who is believed to be so but he who believes he is so: in that way alone does belief endow itself with true reality.

— Michel de Montaigne,
'The Taste of Good and Evil Things Depends on our Opinion'

the ghost writer (2010)

All animals photographed
are spirit animals.

a married woman (1964)

la habanera (1937)

Do not linger over the matter but over my fashioning of it.

how tasty was my little frenchman (1971)

Oh, when titles out-do their productions =/ Coming from the school of the Cinema Novo: an attempted dramatic story with a subtle visual influence inspired by the same spirit guiding the popular, and contemporaneous, low-fi pornochanchadas; where even the subject matter resonates this: A History of Exploitation, easily could be an alternate title. Europeans on different sides are shown pulling apart the resources and land of a previously existing culture. In this way, 'How Tasty...' can be categorized as a true exploitation film — Ultimately rejected by the Cannes Film Festival due to excessive nudity. In form :: The use of the original indigenous Tupi language, and of maintaining the languages of the separate nations (making the picture diversely linguistic) // The high number of talent playing the natives // The art design of their culture (especially the body paint) // The field-recorded tribal chants interspersed throughout the narrative // And, yes, the refreshing attitude of the general nudity of the thing. There is something to say about its use of hand-held color environmental photography, in the context of a historical drama. One can't help but make the comparison of another film that would be shooting nearby within a year (although, admittingly, by a foreign European artist); that film, of course, is Werner Herzog's 'Aguirre: the Wrath of God' (1972). However, Herzog's film contains something dos Santos's does not: enigma. The rhythm of 'How Tasty was my Little Frenchman' falls very quickly after what appears to be a vivid opening arch. Afterwards, however, there is one basic note plucked every few minutes, with not much variety or curiosity explored. The film makes a good singular view — A staging of a European captured by a native tribe, waiting out his days to be eaten. Luckily, this Frenchman, our protagonist, and because he is mistaken to be Portuguese, *is* in fact eaten at the very end of the film by the natives... but not without a prophecy ::

My friends will come to avenge me! No one of yours will remain upon this land.

bonnie and clyde (1967)

gun crazy (1950)

In language there are only differences... A difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. Difference makes character just as it makes value and unit.

— Ferdinand de Saussure, 'Course in General Linguistics'

odd man out (1947)

osama (2003)

Mutability is so inescapable that it even holds true for artificial languages. Whoever creates a language controls it only so long as it is not in circulation; from the moment when it fulfills its mission and becomes the property of everyone, control is lost.

— Ferdinand de Saussure, 'Course in General Linguistics'

three days of the condor (1975)

What attracts the eye?
for what reason?

Cinematic spectatorship, in the activity of emotional response, is dependent upon one's biological empathies, along with all the ego acquired associations.

berlin express (1948)

Liberation depends upon the uncensored independent rubble film.

Or rather, what's left of Frankfurt. The biggest ghost town you've ever seen. A community of hollow shells, chipped and battered by allied bombings, according to a methodical plan. A plan that would cancel out the city as a tough enemy center, and still retain some choice spots... And then there's headquarters city for the American Occupation Zone. There was no such thing as the casual sight-seeing traveler, for no one was here without a purpose. There were other modern touches in this very ancient city. The architecture for instance; new lines, new shapes; generally referred to as early 20th Century Modern Warfare.

So universal is the destruction that it blends into one continuous pattern.

The term 'rubble film' is one normally associated with a genre appearing in post-(world) war (II) Germany. Author Sabine Hake, in 'German National Cinema' describes the Trümmerfilm as remaining "haunted by the experience of war and defeat and the loss of nation and homeland," offering "individual solutions that extricated the protagonists from the burdens of history." In this context, Hake continues, the ruins visualized the desired erasure of the past and the promise of a new beginning captured in the myth of Zero Hour. Accordingly, the cityscape in ruins provided above all a mise-en-scène for the allegorical staging of agony, doubt, hope, and renewal. However, some of those details are specific to the German mindset under post-war conditions. 'Berlin Express' (1948), as the title card makes clear, was shot by authorization of the Allied Armies. Being of the eye of the occupying forces, 'Berlin Express' is closer to a work of heroic iconoclasm than fatalistic soul searching. The key interest / novelty of the picture is the simple of fact of its permission of photography :: the allowance of staging a fictional narrative in the global political center of all things 1948, the hot spot, the still smoking ground zero, along with the mandate and participation of the militarily superior occupying forces. The acting is lackluster, the plot itself is mild and terse, — all of it is arbitrary in the face of its environment and context. The lesson of 'Berlin Express' should be the conscious cultivation and aesthetic exploitation of such an allowance. The actors in these cases are spiritual mediums, allowing the spirit-of-the-time to intoxicate their gesture and voice, (as when Merle Oberon gorgeously recites in response to the final question of where she can be found in the near future, "Nowhere for very long. Don't you see? There is nothing one can count on. No one's address is dependable. But if ever the War should come to finish, I will see that you know where to find me.") for the sole purpose of being poetically fixed. There should be a constant tension, from the very beginning of the film until the very end, between the exoteric visual composition and the esoteric narrative generated by the story — [i.e.: something like a freer, looser David Fincher]. The landscape of the rubble film in abstract, simply being defined as a cinematic narrative staged in a current or recently devastated war zone, does carry what is arguably a universal, mythological archetype with its image, despite any objectivity of reason or subjectivity of judgement: translating interiority into exteriority, Hake writes, and of articulating social problems through psychological problems. It is the landscape of a new horizon, with a cycle of pleasurable growth and catharsis performed on the physical grounds of trauma; what is allowed to be staged here will also be an ideology allowed to crystallize.

They who stage the rubble film(s), win the war.

Berlin. Well, not quite. The city itself is some fifteen miles off by way of the autobahn. And when you get there you wonder how you can call it a city. Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich. The focal point of the rise-and-fall of a dictator is today a monument of ruins. Other cities, like Hiroshima, have been obliterated. But no other city so mighty as Berlin has fallen so low. Less than four years of wind, rain, and sun, has left a drab, colorless dead city in its wake. This was one case where justice had made the punishment fit the crime. Berlin, capital of a world that was supposed to revolve around a building called the Reich Chancellery, around a leader who stood on a balcony and explained how it would last for a thousand years.

awakening of the beast (1970)

awakening of the beast (1970)

But every secret has its little casket, and this absolute, well-guarded secret is independent of all dynamism.

awakening of the beast (1970)

All great, simple images reveal a psychic state.

fast, cheap, and out of control (1997)

The rhythm is immediately immersive, as if thrown into an event mid-occurence; this, paired with the consistent motif of the montage of the western pop-cultural motion media, both contemporary to its making and historical, asynchronously bound to a sweeping score by Caleb Sampson, merges a sensation of nostalgia and memory along throughout the entire work. This memory is an uncanny one, as Freud writes, ... the uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar [heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition. // It's the memory of a culture, bleeding into that of one commenting on the act of civilization, gracing even the act of being, — it is a latent memory, exactly as described by Freud, as if something were trying to leap out of the material, something repressed, something felt, even glimpsed, but hidden away before my awareness. There is never an attempt to literally tie the four stories together. The super structure of the narrative whole, as designed by Morris, is both in its method of production and sequence arrangement :: the hyper-specificity of the four professions, — a mole rat specialist, a topiary gardener, an artificial intelligence engineer, a lion trainer, — the acquisition of hyper-specific advice, hyper-specific consequences, ... at such a level of detail, the disparate stories begin to resemble each other, not in content, but in relationships // in structure. And suddenly all four appear to tell one story. This is a metaphysical notion, albeit quietly, as the basic principle outlining the associations is one straight out of the classical Mystery schools, As Above, So Below; that all systems of organization are reflective of each other, fractal, of a resonance coming from a primary essence of all existence (although the center is unknown). This means the way in which a sincere and observant lion trainer describing how one of his lions orients itself within its confines :: Once they've established this is their cage: this is where they eat, this is where they sleep, this is where they drink: all their creature comforts are connected with that cage, - you don't particularly want to leave it. They don't really consider themselves caged: outside the cage is the cage, inside is their world. :: is also a revelation bearing traces of the highest orders of human and cosmic form. Silently, this is the emphasized; an idea of the metaphysics through hyper-specificity; how every little piece is always in reflection of a larger mysterious Unity; something Morris makes explicit not in what he shows, but what he doesn't show; that being, the virtual object sculpted by the coincidental absence from all the present elements. This was the first film Errol Morris utilized the Interrotron.

In the ultimate form, all of this stuff is looking at Other. The exploring and finding of animals that have absolutely nothing to do with any control that we as a person would have, that feeling that you are in the presence of life that exists irrelevant of yourself. That's the Other. And the Other isn't something to be feared; y'know, people are afraid of new, different, strange, ... but to me it isn't something to be feared, it's something to be wondered at, and looked at, and explored, ... Perhaps communicated with, — not to sit down and have a conversation, — but to take pictures of it and see if you can get the moment where the animal is actually looking at you and you feel there is a moment of contact: I know you Are. You know I Am. ...it's not something that happens everyday, you have to go out and look for it.

awakening of the beast (1970)

What is a character?

It's etymological origins remind us that a character is an engraved mark, a symbol or imprint on the soul, an engraving, a pointed stake, something scraped or scratched. But of or from what? In the sense of the classical dramatic-narrative, and in consequence, of our own daily lives, this character is something grafted out of the invisible spiritual-energy which binds a given society. Character, then, is the manifestation of a system's values.Within the narrative world, a character can not simply be a prop or column for a protagonist, or for the unfolding of a certain plot point; the spectator, vulnerably open in a state of constant expectation, semiotically absorbs a dramatis personae in the same way a richly iconographic renaissance painting stimulates the linguistic mechanisms in the brain :: immediately and unconsciously.  A character is a symbol in the way all things are symbols, yes -- but a character can, and should, also be seen as a fleshy-knot holding within a unique contradictory textual code, breaking through the fourth-dimension of time to display and reveal a systemic energy that can no longer be sustained quietly. This is why the great fictional characters across recorded history are always highly-vivid, cartoon like in their contours (near stereotype, but not quite), and dare I almost say: accessorized. Something is breaking out of the textural life-ether into a Violent cognitive awareness. This is done through character.

What makes Ze striking is Marin's grafting of a highly specific energy, breaking the sleep of the normative, axiomatic, personal figures, and dramatizing what otherwise would be, simply, repression.

la chinoise (1967)