Recycled from my
r/TrueFilm post:
Galaxy of Terror (1981) - ★★★
A wonderful piece of cosmic cheese, a bastardized version of Alien, Galaxy of Terror is by no means a masterpiece, nor the peak of kitsch, but a justly enjoyable experience just the same. A special shout-out for the scene in which a naked woman is all covered in alien spunk. Controversial opinion: Better than Alien.
The Text of Life (1974) - ★★★½
This may be one of Brakhage's most demanding, mainly due to its length. It's one thing to sit through some blinking lights when the whole thing is no longer than 5 minutes, and a wholly different thing, when it clocks at more than an hour. Besides, unlike Dog Star Man, this is 100% abstract, and you can't really try to notice any shapes, or forms at all. That is any recognizable ones. This one is much slower than, say, Black Ice, or Dante's Quartet that contain hundreds of images edited at a neck-breaking speed, as the "shots" here are much longer and consist mainly of different reflections of light. Some of them are really beautiful, possibly even enhanced by the low quality VHS copy I watched.
Duvidha (1973) - ★★★★
In India the colour of mourning is white.
Finally gotten around to watching a Parallel Cinema film other than Satyajit Ray's, and also my first Mani Kaul at that. The film feels like a precautionary fairy tale directed at married women, although I may be entirely wrong in interpreting it. Visually, the film feels like a more ascetic, stripped-down The Color of Pomegranates, and quite honestly, its minimalist myth-like story seemed to weigh it down a little bit. I think it would work better as a totally story-free poetic cinema. Looking forward to more Kaul.
Antigone (1992) - ★★★★
Yet another film of the acclaimed duo. Perhaps only Straub and Huillet give these "ancient" tragedies any justice, faithfully holding to the text. This style however, has also its obvious shortcomings. It's uncompromising, not flashy in the least, and very novellistically prolix. Even though filled with speech up to the nines, I can't remember any films other than those of Straub-Huillet, where we see sunbeams slowly appearing on actor's face, unveiing the movement of heavenly bodies as the only measure of time. Quite an awe-inspiring thing that should be practised by more filmmakers. The story of Antigone is so far the only story Straub-Huillet directed that I've known before, and the execution is superb with true Greek chorus, the actors reciting as if they were genuine Greeks (even though they speak German), and the overall feel of theatre BUT alfresco, amongst the nature. The framing is impeccable as well. Straub and Huillet are true masters of composition. A great, great, great film, albeit one that's not entirely right up my alley.
From the Clouds of the Resistance (1979) - ★★★★
One of the most acclaimed of Straub-Huillet, a mix between Too Early / Too Late and something like The Death of Empedocles, is a film in two distinctive parts. The first one takes place in antiquity and features a couple of vignettes of some historical and mythical characters conversing about various subjects. The second takes place (I think) right after Word War II and talks about some Communists. Lovely that some longer parts feature no dialogue at all, what a relief after these long conversations. Still, not enough of these non-verbal interludes. It's not surprising Straub-Huillet smuggle Communist ideas/ideology even in their films taking place in ancient times, but here, especially in part two, they're no longer hiding it, and are very open about it. Leftists were so prominent in cinema in the 60s and 70s...
Pirosmani (1969) - ★★★★½
It's incredible how much sense of space this film has, especially given it's a biography of a primitive painter. Rather than trying to emulate Pirosmani's painting style (quite honestly, though, only an animation could do it any justice), the film invents its own visual language, a style most prominent painters would not be ashamed of. As a biography, it's as far from glorifying as possible, showing a rather fallen, unhappy person that struggles to get by, not just in the world of art, but also in the world where you have to eat to survive. At times willingfully refusing the help of others, Pirosmani lived like a pauper in the last couple years of his life, to be recognized as a great artist only after his death. This film's simplicity and inner beauty won my heart.
The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (1975) - ★★★★½
A Norwegian box-office hit that sold 5.5 million tickets in a country whose population was not even 5 million. Apparently there's a lot of resemblance between this and Phantom Menace's race scenes. The film itself is enchanting! What a heart-warming story! The two bird characters are absolutely adorable, and the stop-motion puppetry nothing short of impressive. Towards the end of the film I could not hold my tears anymore and started crying, moved not by the sadness, but the happiness, goodness and honesty.
Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinéma (2004) - ★★★★½
A "best of" Godard's most ambitious effort - Histoire(s) du cinéma. As a compilation of the 5 hours long film, it works great, as it reminded me how and why the full version is a total masterpiece. It made me increase its rating to full 5 stars, while also rating this one a 4.5. As some guy on RYM said, "our whole history should be told like that".
Here Godard talks about what cinema is:
" [...] With cinema it is something else. It is life. Nothing new, but hard to talk about. Tough enough to live and die it, but to talk about it... There are books. But cinema isn't books. Just music and painting which can be lived but not really talked about. So cinema, you see now, what to say about it. Life is the subject. Cinemascope and color its attributes, if we are broad-minded. Life, a beginning of life like Euclid's parallel lines, is a beginning of geometry. There have been other lives, will be others: a broken blossom, hunted lions, the silence of a hotel in Sweden. Others' lives are unsettling. The life itself I'd like to blow out of proportion to make it admired or reduced to its basic elements for students and Earth dwellers in general and spectators in particular. The life itself I'd like to hold prisoner by means of pans of nature, fixed shots of death, long and short takes, loud and soft sounds, free or enslaved actors and actresses - but life thrashes about worse than Nanook's fish, slips away like Monica's memories in the Red Desert around Milan. All is eclipsed, and it so happens that the only big problem in cinema is where and why to start a shot and where and why to end it."
A genius.
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