The Soviet director’s first surviving short film is full of the
blunders you'd expect from an average student film. Nevertheless, it
already shows signs of what would make the director great later in
life. At the same time, we must not forget the film's racial
politics and how they show that even the self-proclaimed
internationalist Soviet Union wasn't immune to reproducing racism.
Besides being an impressive document about London in the Swinging
Sixties, Antonioni's Blow-Up can also be read as a powerful parable
on the nature of photography. Specifically on the idea that a
photograph always points to something outside of the scope of what
it depicts, as John Berger puts it in Understanding a Photograph.
Zama is an impressive portrait of how colonialism
transforms all of its subjects - not only the oppressed but also the
oppressors. Its only flaw is that it's too derivative of the
artificiality of 20th-century avant-garde filmmaking, and as a
result too self-conscious to become a real classic. It's worth a
watch nevertheless.
I was first introduced to Kill the Jockey after repeated
recommendations by my girlfriend. To summarize the movie through
text feels like it could only end as a reductive endeavor, much like
how filming book adaptations often leads to disjointed, hollow
versions of the original text. For the sake of this review, I'll try
my best anyway.
I had to sit down to watch this film four times, because I fell
asleep each time after 30 min. It had been a very long time since I
watched a movie that bored me so much, I struggled with following
the characters and the plot, because I couldn't manage to feel
involved.
At first glance, this movie reminded me of those historical Latin
American documentaries that my dad would watch as a child after late
lunch on Sunday, or a slow period drama we would watch for
‘educational purposes’ in the last weeks of school before summer
break.
When the first slap hit Maggie Gyllenhaal's backside, my instincts
immediately told me that I was not going to agree with this movie,
shocked by the nonchalant and seemingly unquestioned manner
sadomasochism towards a young woman was being portrayed on my
screen. Yet, in the course of watching Steven Shainberg's Secretary,
I found myself in a sphere of inner debate, unsure if what I was
watching was to be interpreted as an anti-feminist,
glorifying-violence-towards-women—but-it’s-okay-cause-she-seems-to-like-it
story by a male director or perhaps a feminist masterpiece?
The poem wool & cashmere is a lyrical take on the
exploration of the hidden love motif, desire, and inevitable
destruction in the 1961 movie The Children's Hour, starring
Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine as two teachers in an all-girls
school.