If you don’t like Bogart playing the archetype 50s good guy, watch him play in Sierra Madre. He creates a very credible role out of a difficult and ambiguous character. Worth while watching for Bogart’s acting especially. These old movies are not without really awful stereotypes: in this movie it’s not the blacks or women, but the Mexican natives (or Indians as they are called), they’re dumb, lazy or naive, but never as clever and complicated as the white roles. Alas.

Andrei Tarkovsky, The Sacrifice (1986), Sweden

A display of visual theater, absolutely amazing and probably Tarkovsky’s best. The script is of a literary quality that is rare in cinema.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (1986) Tarkovsky on cinema and time.

I watched The Defiant Ones movie because Desmond Tutu referred to it as one of the visual influences in his upbringing and the formation of his racial awareness. There are mainly two moving scenes: 1. As the black inmate is pulled out the river by the chained white companion, he thanks the white man, to which the white man replies: ‘Thanks for what? I didn’t pull you out, I prevented you from pulling me in.’ The second scene happens when they are freed from each other, their chains broken, but they have become bound by their soul and fate. As the white inmate falls down in exhaustion, urging the black fellow to move on without him, the black inmate holds out his arm stretched toward him, and says: ‘com’on, get up, you’re holding up the chain.’ The two main actors display an excellent classic performance, and it’s hard to forget their faces at these two scenes, once you’ve seen them. It’s a movie from 1958 and while it attempts the emancipation of race, it also displays a flaw in another way, and documents a shameful stereotype of gender. As the two prisoners reach a single woman’s home, she immediately falls in love with the white prisoner, then becoming hysterical etc. Race before gender, a tough bitter pill to swallow for the ladies, but a classic race movie with two tough guys.

Kar Wai Wong, 2046 (2005), China

Links:
2046 @wikipedia

Michael Haneke, Das Schloss (1997)

Werner Herzog, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Links:
Kaspar Hauser @wikipedia
Werner Herzog @wikipedia
Werner Herzog @imdb

Peter Greenaway, The Pillow Book (1996)

Links:
The Pillow Book @wikipedia

Jim Jarmusch, Dead Man (1995)

“Expect poison from standing water”
William Blake (1757-1827)

Dead Man is a classic in the genre of Jim Jarmusch movies. This metaphoric biography of the English poet, painter, artist William Blake, one of the true great poets of the English language, has come so close to the Platonic ideal of Blake the man and his life, that it is an eerie description of an interpretation. The guide of Blake is the native American Nobody, who leads Blake from the greenhorn accountant to the feared outlaw, from the neurotic ratio to the intuitive heart. Blake is shot close to the heart right at the beginning of the movie and throughout his fugitive travels through the wilderness of desert and dark forests his bleeding does not stop.

On the surface Dead Man is a parody on the American western, a poetic anti-Western, with comic scenes like cult-hero Iggy Pop in the role of Sally, the transvestite trapper, who cooks beans for Big George (Billy Bob Thornton) and Tench (Jared Harris). But beyond the surface lies an artistic depth that few American movies are able to achieve. It is one of those rare movies, which allows you to discover symbolism with no end, leaving you to think and connect the scenes, words with their methporic meaning for hours or days after having seen it. Continue reading →

Vincent Gallo is not a movie director pur sang, not because he is not a real movie director, but because he is really a lot of other things, an ex-painter too good and too spitefull to paint, a model (but there’s no real merit in that), an unrecognized musician, and actor, among other things. He is also a typical product of American culture, that is, an inferior, deranged, obnoxious attention-seeker with a brilliant eye for appearances. A lack of recognition combined with an endless over-estimation of one’s own superiority is a perfect as imperfect combination for genius. That Gallo has a spark of genius to display is proven in Buffalo ’66 (1998).

The story line of Buffalo ’66 in the beginning is completly absurd and unrealistic, but realistic enough to keep you doubtful about Gallo’s intentions. He weaves the red threat of the movie between symbolic and realistic images, where the action mainly represents the emotional state of the semi-autobiographical antagonist. This movie is in essence a coming of age thriller, about Gallo’s emotional complexities, complexities that he probably will never solve, if there’s a desire to solve them to start with. The American heartland is full of desolate youth without a way to release their anger and fulfill their sense of forsakenness. No matter how rich and diverse American culture is, there is a certain incompletion of the American psyche, which is beautifully expressed in Buffalo ’66. Continue reading →

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Das Leben der Anderen (2006)

Links:
Das Leben der Anderen @imdb
The Lives of Others @wikipedia
The Lives of Others @Sony Pictures