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Worldly Desires (43min)
A couple escapes their family to look for a spiritual tree in the jungle. When the night falls, a song comes from somewhere. It speaks about an innocent idea of love and happiness and conveys a sense of guiltless freedom when being hot by love. The film is a little simulation of manners and dedicated to the memories of filmmaking in the jungle during the year 2001-2005.
Apichatpong WeerasethakulRead More »
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Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought an appetite for experimentation to Thai cinema with his debut feature, an uncategorizable work that refracts documentary impressions of his homeland through the surrealist concept of the exquisite corpse game. Enlisting locals to contribute improvised narration to a simple tale, Apichatpong charts the collective construction of the fiction as each new encounter imbues it with unpredictable shades of fantasy and pathos. Shot over the course of two years in 16 mm black and white, Mysterious Object at Noon established the director’s fascination with the porous boundaries between the real and the imagined.Read More »
This is a series of shorts that Lynch made after Mulholland Drive, using the actors from that film.
A story of a group of humanoid rabbits and their depressive, daily life. The plot includes Jane ironing, Suzie sitting on a couch, Jack walking in and out of the apartment, and the occasional solo singing number by Suzie or Jane. At one point the rabbits also make contact with their “leader”. A really Lynch-esque series of episodes.
A slow, stylish, eerie and extremely interesting story set “in a city deluged by constant rain where three rabbits live with a constant mystery”. Mr Lynch has a great talent for establishing atmosphere and this series is soaked with his trademark (weird) mood. When I watched the first episode I was not sure whether to laugh or be baffled at what I was seeing. 3 Rabbits talk out of sequence, an unseen audience claps whenever one of them enters the room and laughs (not because something funny is said, but at the misery of the rabbits), a candle burns in the corner, a demon face chants something undecipherable (reminds me of the litanies of Satan, the camera seems to be disturbed in the beginning of the 7 out of 8 episodes by something I can only guess to be a spirit.Read More »
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By the time Michelangelo Antonioni released Michelangelo Eye to EyeBeyond the Clouds in 1995, his keen sense of patient, intimate observation had seemed to give way to a kind of leering, gratuitous voyeurism in the film’s repeated, over-lingering shots of the female form. It is, however, precisely this painstaking attention to the voluptuousness of form and tactileness of surfaces that makes his subsequent short film, Michelangelo Eye to Eye particularly sensual and textural in its execution. Prefaced with a text description of the filmmaker’s recent health problems (in particular, a debilitating stroke that left him partially paralyzed), the film opens with a shot of a frail Antonioni emerging from the shadows as he walks in slow, awkward gait into an unpopulated hall where Michelangelo Buonarotti’s marble statue of Moses – a scaled down version of an ambitiously conceived wall tomb for Pope Julius II – is once again in display after a period of meticulous restoration. Composed of a series of detailed observations of the sculpture’s composition from several camera angles and vantage points, Antonioni continually refocuses to the shot of Moses’ opaque gaze – an image that is sublimely matched by the filmmaker’s own occluded, returned gaze as he examines the object of his attention through limpid, watery eyes. In addition to creating a thorough, meticulous, and deliberative objective study of the Renaissance sculpture’s robust physical form and timeless, universal beauty, Antonioni’s juxtaposition of his own weakened, aging frame against the larger-than-life sculpture of Moses creates an indelible, thoughtful, and poignant image on human frailty, transience, creative compromise, and the enduring legacy of – and mortal transcendence through – enlightened art.
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Zabriskie Point, director Michelangelo Antonioni’s only American film, is an unusual, visually stunning examination of youthful rebellion against the Establishment. The film, initially presented in quasi-documentary style, presents a group of college activists discussing key issues of their political agenda. Mark (Mark Frechette) steals an airplane and flies over a desert where he meets Daria (Daria Halprin). She is the pot-smoking secretary to businessman Lee Allen (Rod Taylor), while he is a rebel searching for a worthy cause. In the midst of the arid surroundings, Mark and Daria fall in love. Antonioni’s nonrealistic approach to American counterculture myths, his loose and sluggish narrative, and the dialogue (credited to Fred Gardner, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe, and Antonioni) caused Zabriskie Point to be poorly received when it was first released. The score features songs from Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, Kaleidoscope, The Rolling Stones, John Fahey, The Youngbloods and Patti Page.Read More »
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Feb. 19, 1965
Red Desert is at once the most beautiful, the most simple and the most daring film yet made by Italy’s masterful Michelangelo Antonioni, a director so prodigiously gifted that he can marshal a whole new vocabulary of cinema to reiterate his now-familiar themes. The new element of Antonioni’s art is color. In Red Desert he shows a painterly approach to each frame; indeed he had whole fields and streets sprayed with pigment to produce precise shades of mood and meaning. Never has so bleak a vision of contemporary life been projected with more intensity, from craven yellow and life-brimming green to violent, passionate crimson and the grey of total despair.Read More »
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader wrote:
The controversial, highly charged 1960 masterpiece that put Michelangelo Antonioni’s name on the international map. It’s a work that requires some patience–a 145-minute mystery that strategically elides any conventional denouement–but more than amply repays the effort. The ambiguous title adventure begins on a luxury pleasure cruise. The disconsolate girlfriend (Lea Massari) of a successful architect (Gabriele Ferzetti) mysteriously disappears on a remote volcanic island, and the architect and the woman’s best friend (Monica Vitti) set out across Italy looking for her, becoming involved with each other along the way. In the course of their epic travels, Antonioni paints a complex portrait of a crisis in contemporary values and relationships. His stunning compositions and choreographic mise en scene, punctuated by eerie silences and shots that linger expectantly over landscapes, made him a key Italian modernist director of the 50s and 60s, perhaps rivaled only by Rossellini. This haunting work–the first in a loose trilogy completed by La notte and Eclipse–shows him at the summit of his powers.Read More »
A three-part collaboration of auteurs Michelangelo Antonioni ,Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar-Wai on the subject of eroticism. With, amongst others, Gong Li and Robert Downey jr.
Totalling 108 minutes.
1, Antonioni – “Il filo pericoloso delle cose”
2, Soderbergh – “Equilibrium”
3, Wong Kar-Wai – “The Hand”Read More »
The Passenger (1975) marked the end of Antonioni’s three picture deal with MGM, and simultaneously the end of his mainstream acceptance. Although revered now as one of his finest works, The Passenger had lukewarm reception at best, with most of the American critics still bitter of Antonioni’s caricaturing of American capitalism in Zabriskie Point (1969). Since those two films had been costly flops, Antonioni found himself unable to secure investors for the arthouse pictures he’d become known for. Five years past, and still not a film, until finally Antonioni settled on The Oberwald Mystery.Read More »