There are two adventures in cinema that I find the most fascinating, both wonderful, both restoring our narrow vision into dimensions that encompass a broader world. One is the folding of our world into the mind in an effort to apprehend the mechanisms that give rise to images and give rise to narratives; lately Lynch is the best we have working this, earlier it was Greenaway and Ruiz. The other, even more difficult to accomplish, is the severing of those mechanisms in ways that unlock life as a space impregnated with emptiness, such as once was the province of Antonioni. Bela Tarr is the one currently working on this, but he has to struggle against the dismay from his Nietzchean mind.
The first was primarily invented by the French in the '20s, derived from impressionist painting, itself influenced by Buddhist notions about the fleeting world. The subjective eye in motion, this was at the center of this first great school in film, later passed on from Epstein and L'Herbier to Eisenstein and co who analyzed even deeper to invent what is now a common vocabulary in film.
The French rested on cinematic motion however with a kind of cosmopolitan longeur for the sorrowful beauties of modern life. There was too much absinthe in Epstein and Kirsanoff's camera, wonderful absinthe. Views were distorted, lights dimmed, kaleidoscopic; but there was no still point in their moving universe, no spot that was immovable in which to ground oneself.
Resnais supplied a kind of emptiness in the center of that eye, this has been his greatest contribution. Everything else was resigned to be ineffable, chimeric. Next to him, as I now discover, is this guy who continues from the margins to make adventurous films to this day. I will want to explore, but for now we have this.
No doubt he had seen Marienbad, several times for its mysterious folded time with memory. Likely Tarkovsky, then breaking his own ground. Equipped with these, he set out to invent at a very young age.
So how to create in the space between these giants? His solution is simple, to a degree naive; film long sweeps of a moving world with an eye always at anxiety and oppression, allow traces of a familiar narrative in the parts but faint enough to resist us, then assert the whole to be reflecting more broadly by giving it to us from the eyes of a child. So a purely internal landscape is what we have, stirred by anxieties from a distant half-remembered surface.
The problem remains however, that Resnais attempted to solve by addressing the circumstances of life that would trigger the restless sleep of memory. There is no footing in a world that matters, no still point from which to harken at the silent roar from the engines of the universe. No insight of the controls.
Even so, if none of this ever made you pause, you can be soothed here by just how adept this guy was with images. The translucent beauty of the dreamscape. The sadness that permeates everywhere. If you have absorbed this and are looking for more, you may want to have a look at a little known film called Cuadecuc, Vampir. It is similar to this but more erudite I feel, in connecting the dream with the process that gives rise to it.
The first was primarily invented by the French in the '20s, derived from impressionist painting, itself influenced by Buddhist notions about the fleeting world. The subjective eye in motion, this was at the center of this first great school in film, later passed on from Epstein and L'Herbier to Eisenstein and co who analyzed even deeper to invent what is now a common vocabulary in film.
The French rested on cinematic motion however with a kind of cosmopolitan longeur for the sorrowful beauties of modern life. There was too much absinthe in Epstein and Kirsanoff's camera, wonderful absinthe. Views were distorted, lights dimmed, kaleidoscopic; but there was no still point in their moving universe, no spot that was immovable in which to ground oneself.
Resnais supplied a kind of emptiness in the center of that eye, this has been his greatest contribution. Everything else was resigned to be ineffable, chimeric. Next to him, as I now discover, is this guy who continues from the margins to make adventurous films to this day. I will want to explore, but for now we have this.
No doubt he had seen Marienbad, several times for its mysterious folded time with memory. Likely Tarkovsky, then breaking his own ground. Equipped with these, he set out to invent at a very young age.
So how to create in the space between these giants? His solution is simple, to a degree naive; film long sweeps of a moving world with an eye always at anxiety and oppression, allow traces of a familiar narrative in the parts but faint enough to resist us, then assert the whole to be reflecting more broadly by giving it to us from the eyes of a child. So a purely internal landscape is what we have, stirred by anxieties from a distant half-remembered surface.
The problem remains however, that Resnais attempted to solve by addressing the circumstances of life that would trigger the restless sleep of memory. There is no footing in a world that matters, no still point from which to harken at the silent roar from the engines of the universe. No insight of the controls.
Even so, if none of this ever made you pause, you can be soothed here by just how adept this guy was with images. The translucent beauty of the dreamscape. The sadness that permeates everywhere. If you have absorbed this and are looking for more, you may want to have a look at a little known film called Cuadecuc, Vampir. It is similar to this but more erudite I feel, in connecting the dream with the process that gives rise to it.