Thursday, January 06, 2005

 
My first experience with Guy Maddin in his Dracula left me giddily turned on by his use of melodrama, montage, music, and film grain. My second disappointed me, although sexual perversion, faked hand transplants, lovers' betrayals, murders are aplenty: Maddin promises us fun in Cowards Bend at the Knee. The beginning of the protagonist's troubles develops from the "joy, joy, joy of meeting someone new," a girl obsessed with the formaldehyde-preserved blue hands of her dead father. Should I continue with any more of the absurd plot, you would not want to see the film: camp and horror genres' cliches find a perfect marriage here. Plot is just the fun on which Maddin bases his visual experimentation here. By using the fast-forward button of his film editing program (although I could be dead wrong on this technically), Maddin induces the visual effect of hands slapping and hitting, although in real time the hands would just be going through the motions. Although Maddin's vision remains strong in Cowards Bend at the Knee, what he makes the audience look at is lacking in verve. In Dracula, his style and vision perfectly matched the elegiac and unsettling mood. Here, he is just having a boy's fun, sloping towards physical hilarity without enough normalcy beneath to queer it up.

posted by Open Mouth 7:58 PM

Sunday, January 02, 2005

 
"Si tu veux faire partie des vivants, il est temps d'apprendre a vivre. Il n'est pire douleur que de decouvrir qu'on a ete heureux sans le savoir quand on a cesse de l'etre." --Marc Soriano

Only by knitting could I stay awake through Godard's latest: Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinema, which I sat through at the Centre Pompidou tonight. The nice boy next to me left halfway. I gave Godard a second chance. His montage technique should be showing me what he means, but instead I'm lectured at. He illustrates his speech with beautifully married images (a flock of birds let loose from screen's center bottom fly over a close-up of a woman's ecstatic face--that one won't leave me soon), but he's neither didactic enough to serve as an art history professor (words serving images) nor precise enough to be interesting. I'm not so sure I'll give him a third chance.

posted by Open Mouth 5:29 PM