Reviews

Human After All [ANNETTE]

Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

Annette

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Leos Carax

Yes, that opening. But not just “So May We Start,” which is as rousing, cheeky, and entrancing a first song as a film such as this could ask for. The film properly opens — after the far sillier spoken introduction — with a brief snatch of the French folk song “Au clair de la lune,” which leads into a shot of the outside of a Los Angeles studio at night. This image is rapidly overtaken by feedback manifested visually by red soundwaves, a motif carried into the studio itself, where musicians prepare to record, each burst of noise causing the camera to flicker, as shots are briefly overlaid on each other. This finally leads to Leos Carax calling over his daughter Nastya in French before introducing the first of many proper Sparks recordings.

Leaving aside the obvious narrative implications of a song called “By the light of the moon,” the credits specify that this is the “first recording of a human voice,” and that collision of traditions within a given medium course through Annette‘s veins. French and American, primitive paper recordings and high-tech digital audio, silent and sound cinema: these are the terms on which Carax is working, in which material reality coexists side-by-side with the unreal. In that sense, Annette’s central puppet deftly straddles the line between the two: a physical object that always feels uncanny.

The same could very much be said of Sparks’s music: I’ve listened to very little of their work otherwise, but the music on its own, while frequently catchy or at the very least an earworm, works here in large part because of its slipperiness, its integration with the dialogue. Henry’s first, abrasive show is a perfect introduction: slipping into no less than three, perhaps four songs over the course of about ten minutes, all moving with such abandon that it’s difficult to tell whether the songs are part of the act or part of the musical component. Of course, that slipperiness is inherent to the confrontations, arguments, and declarations of affections that speckle this film in musical form. But even more disorientingly, the actors’ intonations and recitations of dialogue often land in a phantom zone between speech and song, where it is throughly muddled whether a given line is meant to be part of a song or not.

Such ambiguity often doesn’t extend to the level of narrative, however, for better or worse. Despite its often extravagant scale, what with its globe-hopping scale, constant media intrusion, and apparently years-spanning timeline, Annette is ultimately a small, intimate film, detailing the fallout of the relationships of four broken people, though this is doled out in fits and spurts. Even with all the ruptures and dreamlike moments, there’s a fidelity to emotion that remains paramount, a belief in the tragedy of bonds ruptured by the strength of personal histories and forceful personalities.

Of course, that’s where Adam Driver comes in. The effect of his final scenes, hollowed out and eaten alive by his own actions, is at once startling and entirely in keeping with the arc of his performance. Throughout, he remains prowling and magnetic, and Carax’s camera responds in kind, circling him with the same intent watchfulness that Driver never lets up on. His voice is equally as implacable: sometimes rumbling and portentous, other times high and quavering, in a way wholly unpredictable.

Implicit in this willful disorientation of viewer’s expectations, at least with something that chooses not to establish a baseline aesthetic or reality, is a certain unevenness, only exacerbated by the fragmentation caused by some musical sequences as the film proceeds towards its last trajectory. Some of the treatment of the media, for example, feels straight out of the more parodic moments of Clouds of Sils Maria, and at certain points it’s difficult to ascertain exactly how far the musical concept can be pushed. But more often, Carax lands on images and moments that stun: operatic deaths overlaid on a rushing motorcycle ride, unusually restive shots of a house slowly decaying, and above all the central storm, which combines the thoroughly artificial and archaic rear-projection with water spilling out across the set. Such dichotomies are the lifeblood of Annette: the sacred and the profane, the violent and the tender; Carax incorporates all of these into sequences that stubbornly refuse to remain one or the other, and the finale, which openly confronts the devices that had powered the film prior by stripping them away to just two voices singing, feels pitch perfect.

Daughter of the Good Earth [THE WORKS AND DAYS (OF TAYOKO SHIOJIRI IN THE SHIOTANI BASIN)]

Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by C.W. Winter & Anders Edström

Of course, the conception of an extended film like The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is inseparable from the experience of watching it, and that is true to an immense degree here, but one of the first things that comes to mind when I think about this film came immediately following the film, during the Q&A given by co-director C.W. Winter. He described the conception of the film as stemming from a documentary that he and co-director Anders Edström had been planning to make chronicling the last stretch of time in the life of Shiojiri Junji, the eponymous Tayoko’s husband and Edström’s father-in-law, who passed away roughly a week before they were planning to fly to Japan. After the funeral — shot and included in the film — Winter and Edström came up with the idea to make this film over the next year of theirs, Tayoko’s, and the village’s lives. The process was essentially conceived to act as both catharsis and do-over for Tayoko, who deeply regretted that the last year of Junji’s life was one of the only times that they had ever fought; Winter and Edström would give her the space to say the words she never had the chance to say, do the things she wished she could have done.

This information is present in substantive reviews and interviews of the film (like Lawrence Garcia’s review for Reverse Shot and Mark Peranson’s interview for Cinema Scope), but I hadn’t read them and so I experienced the peculiar feeling of recontextualizing close to an entire day of experience in the moment and yet, any worry about misinterpreting the film without this crucial information almost seems to fade away when confronted by the particulars of this mammoth work of intimacy, so concerned it is with operating according to its own drumbeat, sans annotation or inflection outside of what can be conveyed with film grammar, performance, structure, and other such cinematic devices.

There are a great deal of those in The Works and Days, which runs eight hours across five chapters of unequal length, each devoted to a season (beginning in winter), and designed to be shown in four parts with two fifteen-minute intermissions and one hour-long lunch break, in emulation of the work day. Within this span, aside from the slow death of Junji, which comes more and more to the fore as the film moves through its second half, attempts at establishing narrative or concrete throughlines are almost completely elided, so much so that the relationships of the forty-some characters within this are astonishingly tenuous and difficult to grasp. But this is very much part of Winter and Edström’s project, a kind of deep immersion founded upon the hybrid documentary-fiction form so en vogue in the current festival trends.

What quickly becomes apparent is that the film manages to downplay even those elements: each part begins with a black screen accompanied by a dense soundscape of natural sounds; Winter says that such a conceit is designed to acclimate the viewer to the change in season heralded by these interludes, and which additionally serves as magnificent breathers, pauses that feel compelling in the darkness of the theater. But the lack of human presence in what may very well be the majority of this film arises not long afterwards; what initially begins as seemingly standard establishing shots of nature reveals itself as a vital leg on which The Works and Days stands. The images of trees, skies, horizons, plants, streams, mountains, and exteriors are themselves not long: the film itself relies little on extended takes — which when they do appear are focused on conversation and storytelling — and the nature shots are even shorter, typically lasting in rhythmic fashion around five or six seconds. However, the sheer volume of them is impressed upon, though it isn’t applied in a punishing fashion, varying and interweaving with the actors’ performances.

And it is important that these be recognized as performances, and as a narrative, albeit one constructed with much the same process as a Hong Sang-soo film, if he was inclined to shoot thousands of shots of nature: scenes were written the night before or the day of their shooting, various obstacles were incorporated in the narrative, though the scattered, open, and almost improvisatory process of filming meant that the scenes ended up being filmed entirely achronologically. Of course, Pedro Costa might be a better comparison point: Edström had been regularly visiting the village for 21 years as a family member prior to beginning filming, and the process was undertaken in close collaboration with Shiojiri herself, along with her family and fellow inhabitants; it’s worth noting that Winter and Edström themselves have a fairly significant presence onscreen as family members, not as directors.

Still, Costa’s work, wedded at the hip to his intense chiaroscuro and desolate settings as it is, feels far different from what Winter and Edström are achieving here, and thus the length returns to the fore. At such a length, what is intended as a fictionalized recreation of the previous year of a woman’s life metamorphosizes into a near-documentary telling of the processes of living and cultivating, in a manner not dissimilar at all from the use of time (if not shot) duration as Jeanne Dielman, or, more perversely, The Mother and the Whore. What is, as in Rivette and Godard’s famous quotes, implicit in each film’s document of its creation and its actors becomes in the viewer’s mind explicit.

This isn’t to say that an uninflected non-fiction retelling was Winter and Edström’s goal at all. Indeed, The Works and Days is replete with devices that are intended to, if not break the viewer’s experience, then to question it, to augment the sense of a created world with blatant fictions and interventions. The casting of Kase Ryō, one of the preeminent cineastes’ actors of the past two decades, is certainly prominent, though he apparently plays a character with a different surname. But the more pervasive and fascinating break stems from Winter and Edström’s penchant for shooting in near-total darkness, where they trust that the Blackmagic’s digital sensor will pick up something that varies the black expanse. This often results in some truly stunning moments of abstraction, where a few pinpricks of light are all that can be seen, which hover in extended shots. Such moments could function in a similar way to the proliferation of images of nature, but they pop out of the texture with their sheer uniqueness.

Such openness to experimentation and variety is what makes The Works and Days such a rewarding and surprising experience. This even extends to the dedication to a single location, heralded by the title, which is disrupted by a train trip to Kyoto and, in one of the wildest production stories I’ve ever heard, a phone call to Sweden, in which two cameras rolling simultaneously capture an actual phone call taking place nearly 5000 miles apart. Two moments, one involving a sublimely uncanny dissolve effect and the other telling a story only in subtitles, come and go without acknowledgment. And of course, there is that soundtrack, whose dense, enveloping nature-based sounds belie the thorough mixing and sculpting done in post-production.

Winter and Edström’s use of these sequences doesn’t disrupt the astonishing mood sculpted throughout the film. Though they have disavowed the slow cinema label, it might be more accurate to say that the concept doesn’t rely solely on long takes and is more about a certain ethos, for which the emphasis on nature and work surely applies. Indeed, one scene early in the second part feels illustrative of what is so entrancing about The Works and Days, in which Tayoko walks through a series of rooms, as the film cuts to a different shot on each door closing. The artifice of the film is revealed in a moment as mundane as the rest of the film’s actions; though the film was frequently shot with two cameras, there are too many rooms for it to be a continuous action. The two impulses within the film are evoked simultaneously: the almost iconoclastic tendency to show the rhythm of the scene, aesthetic be damned, and the contemplative style, focusing in on one action and how it can say so much about its subject.

I realize now that I’ve said little about that subject, and suffice it to say that Tayoko is remarkable, in large part because of, even under such emotional circumstances, how willing she is to be part of the ensemble, which ranges from the quiet to the rowdy in a way that feels utterly true. Some of her most emotional moments come when she reads some of the diary entries she had actually written during the prior year; her reading is off-the-cuff, as if she is coming up with them in the moment. It is in the pauses of thinking, just before the stream of thoughts resume, that The Works and Days finds its focus, its reason for being, and it is glorious.

2021 Reading Log

Ryan Swen Lists, Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

1. The Crying of Lot 49 (1965, Thomas Pynchon): 5/1/21-6/7/21
The structure threw me off, and while I’m not attributing my repeated failed attempts to begin reading this book to anything except my current living situation, it only became more inexplicable the further I read. The central enigma of the muted post horn and the Tristero only truly emerges around the halfway mark, and a great deal of this is spent in the weeds, the minutiae — not only Pynchon’s numerous historical and literary inventions, but the actual interactions. Indeed, that totally remarkable aspect will stick with me as much as the frightful paranoia that Oedipa eventually undergoes, and the two are inextricably intertwined after a certain point, especially in that nocturnal series of encounters in San Francisco, so utterly dreamlike, yet initially launched into with such a sudden lurch. The irresolution was maybe expected after a certain point, but the way it’s carried out, especially after maybe an overabundance of syntactical curlicues, is unbelievably impactful.

2020 Reading Log

Ryan Swen Lists, Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

1. Zama (1956, Antonio Di Benedetto): 11/19/19-2/8/20 (on-off):
Comparing this with the film is practically unavoidable, seeing as how close to my mind Martel’s work has been during the past few end-of-decade obsessed months, whether while reading this book or not. But what Di Benedetto seems to emphasis above all else is, if not strictly atmosphere in the way that the film would have it, than the impossibility of fully comprehending or understanding it. The odd slips in quotidian time, the overwhelming horniness that possesses Zama, the way in which characters fade in and out of focus, all of this feels explicitly designed to displace the reader, to inhabit the total uncertainty that the main character lives in. All of this is tremendously successful, and the three-part structure serves to highlight the writer’s dexterity: when looked at in pure narrative terms, the three couldn’t be more removed, and yet when placed side-by-side and examined minutely, they proceed with the same purpose.

2. Black Wings Has My Angel (1953, Elliott Chaze): 2/9/20-3/14/20:
Like the best films noir, Black Wings Has My Angel rests upon its strange, resigned fatalism, all in the backwards glance of a man condemned to his vague yet inescapable fate. At the same time, it never feels so irreducibly simple: the details are so exacting that they imprint themselves in the reader’s head; Virginia is a combination of femme fatale tropes that becomes an impossible being, coquettish and proper one moment and ruthless the next; the past of Tim Sunblade/Kenneth is ironclad and thus makes it feel as though anything is possible for him. The result is something that both valorizes and warns against crime, a beautiful set of contradictions that adds up to something even greater than the sum of its parts; in other words, it has the ideal, horrible American spirit at every moment.

December 2019 Capsules

Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

Eyes Wide Shut (rewatch)
It’s crucial that practically the only sexual element that Bill doesn’t shrink away from is the actual centerpiece orgy. Be it the couple passionately kissing on the street, the Japanese businessman with the Russian daughter, the sexual desires of his wife, even the obviously gay hotel concierge: these all visibly upset him more than the slow accumulation of passionless humping that is more glimpsed than reveled in. This is almost to be expected: above all, Bill’s obsession is not with perversion or desire, but with the maintenance in his status quo, only pursuing his little threads as long as he can ensure he won’t get blood on his hands. In the “real world” (on the NYC city streets of a studio) he is constantly under threat, as various intimations of subversive or unconventional sexuality — not to call all of them equally moral — challenge his stalwart viewpoint. In the mansion, he is free to roam and observe, to float from room to room, with a mask on and personality off, without a waiting call from a wife or patient.

But in the end, he’s still wearing a rented tuxedo.

November 2019 Capsules

Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

Jojo Rabbit
Let’s leave aside the extravagant vanity and stupidity of this, a project that seems as much an excuse for Waititi to clown around in Führer cosplay as to indulge his worst and most juvenile tendencies: the twee coming-of-age story, the playful mocking that ultimately coalesces into love. Let’s even excuse the utterly incoherent at best, downright fascistic approach to Nazism, which doesn’t so much dismantle the very real and very dangerous ideology as it presents it baldly and plainly, hoping that the viewer will find these hideous statements and behaviors from cuddly and/or blasé puppets hilarious. Jojo Rabbit would be utterly irredeemable if it just stuck to its proudly “anti-hate satire” formulations and its virtually nonexistent comedy, but it somehow manages to sink lower, into simpering, sappy romance.

Much of Jojo Rabbit is almost literally cloistered, as at least half of the film takes place solely within the eponymous character’s home, where he co-habits with both his vaguely antifascist mother and a teenage Jewish girl. Like with everything in this, Waititi’s approach comes off as maddeningly incoherent, going as far to employ a terribly overextended use of every horror movie trick in the book to accompany her first scene. But slowly, gradually, the true intent is revealed: despite her experiences fleeing the rot of fascist power, she is as flat and childlike as everyone, the object of affection — laid out oh-so-helpfully with paper-animated butterflies — and just another figure for Jojo to latch onto. In doing so, her inherent identity, which has caused the gassing of her parents and her present fearful existence, is all but erased, seemingly replaced uncomfortably with the role of both mother and lover. And in a film that refuses to reckon whatsoever with the horrors of fascism, that lies about the nature of ideologies, that closes itself off from any interesting or subversive view of the modern world, such a grievous conflation is just left there, as abject as anything in this monstrosity of a film.

Martin Eden
It’s crucial that, for all of the political rabble-rousing Martin does in writing and speech over the course of this film, his prose writing, which appears to be a true cornerstone of his success, is relegated in small snatches, only fitfully represented. As shown in his previous work, especially Lost and Beautiful, Marcello’s sensibility is never settled but always restless, and paradoxically the seeming strictures of a narrative format only amplify his tendencies. In this particular case, his penchant for archival footage is weaponized for a specific intent, taking on the immense task of capturing the undeniable power of Martin’s writing. By juxtaposing the bits of writing with longer, more abstruse moments of perhaps-found, perhaps-created shots of mundane life, Marcello both creates an emotional and an intellectual bond, reaching across class and time to conjure up an ever more complicated, beautiful feeling.

October 2019 Capsules

Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

Mahjong
“In ten years, this place will be the center of the world. The future of Western civilization lies right here. And do you know what the odd thing is? We used to study history, the 19th century with the glorious age of imperialism right? Just wait ’till you see the 21st century.”

These words, said in English by an arrogant British industrialist in voiceover towards the close of Mahjong, of course shouldn’t be taken strictly at face value; Yang’s own Yi Yi four years later acts in many ways as a repudiation of a great number of the statements made in this and A Confucian Confusion, effectively the sister film to this. But it acts as a key signifier for Yang’s own intentions: in every work of his save perhaps A Brighter Summer Day, Yang sees the future of Taipei as its past and present, continually reflecting on the former as directly affecting and molding the latter. This is reflected most obviously in the familial relationships, which dominate practically all his films and especially this one, but it reveals itself in so many other ways: the scattered rock memorabilia (especially the Beatles), the past entanglements of multiple characters, and most importantly in language. Here, too, Yang gestures towards the future: Hokkien is phased further out, and English shares center stage with Mandarin. The effect is like a less overtly reflexive version of Mountains May Depart‘s third act: slightly uncanny, immensely focused on the minutiae involved in translation (skewed or otherwise), and eventually incredibly moving. It’s no accident that the two final definitive acts almost eschew language all together: Yang’s cinema is nothing if not at turns impossibly alienated and unbearably intimate, and Mahjong contains both of these impulses at their fullest force.

A City of Sadness
Even besides the obvious narrative and thematic implications that come with language and communication in A City of Sadness, its imprint on reinforcing Hou’s style feels paramount. Taking place at a much more contemplative pace than the naturalistic conversations found elsewhere (especially in scenes with co-writer Wu Nien-jen), the viewer is forced to consider not only what Tony Leung and Xin Shufen write to one another, but how they communicate by other means: the little glances, the manner in which they pass the pen and pad of paper back and forth. It feels so indicative that the words are not shown in inserts of the paper, but in intertitles: even their most inconsequential words are imbued with an additional, almost transcendent power. And the one exception, the message given by Leung to the widow, the words of a man who he never heard or spoke to, accrues its power from the materiality of his final statement, from the imprint of the ink.

Stray Dogs
The Taipei that Hsiao-kang grew up in has almost vanished. Gone are the motorcycle rides that acted as a reprieve from daily existence, the skywalks, the flooded apartments, the street stands. They’ve been supplanted by the high-end condos like Vive L’Amour‘s, only that the erotic potential is gone; even the streets feel sterile now. So Hsiao-kang can only go almost literally underground, with offspring in tow; they wander the construction sites and gleaming supermarkets, eating from plastic takeout trays and fitfully drawing mosquito nets around their meager living conditions. It’s not much, but it’s the home he knows, and the only home he can imagine.

September 2019 Capsules

Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

Days of Being Wild (rewatch)
Wong’s characters’ obsession with time, which reaches its early peak here, fits so deeply into his overall aesthetic concerns because it’s at once concrete and yet subjective. Unlike a pair of earrings, a car, or a lighter, time isn’t something that can be contained, even by the numerous watches or clocks scattered around the relative ghost town of 1960 Hong Kong. Instead, it floats between them, suffusing the characters and their perceptions. For the male characters, it’s more concrete: Leslie Cheung means it when he says he’ll remember his minute with Maggie Cheung, even if he forgets everything else; Andy Lau’s existence is defined by being on the clock, first in vocation and then in tentative infatuation. For the female characters, it’s something more slippery: a state of constant reverie and remembrance, wondering exactly when their relationships went wrong. But no one can escape their own subjectivity, their own flawed commitments: even Tony Leung’s hustler has to glance at his watch before he brings the lights down.

August 2019 Capsules

Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2
Pushes its insistent rhymings with the first film past any reasonable limit: this is no mere referentiality, but conscious inversion and recontextualization from the opening moments, a class-flipped take on the predecessor’s opening scene. That this transpires with the two new main characters, Yeung Yeung and Paul, lends a further unpredictable charge, and a few scenes pass before the original tripartite dynamic is even partially restored — Qi Hong, not coincidentally the most (relatively) stable and committed character of the madcap ensemble, only makes sporadic appearances, which only begin more than twenty minutes in. Instead, the love triangle takes place between the volatile Shen Ran and the two newcomers, yet parallels crop up: Paul spends much of the second half in a soused state heavily reminiscent of Qi Hong in his original state, complete with a penchant for Johnnie Walker; Shen Ran takes Yeung Yeung to the same restaurant where he botched his initial engagement, directly mentioning this fact and prolonging the inevitable conversation until after dessert; Paul cooks seafood for Yeung Yeung in his own relatively humble quarters. “I must have met you before” is said by the new characters multiple times, and in a sense it’s true; by the time the opening is reinvoked once more with Chi Yan sitting on the bus in tears and Shen Ran driving by her in a sports car, the viewer would be forgiven for a strong case of déjà vu.

And yet it feels all so new, or at least cyclical in a way that feels genuine. The economic aspect sets the tone: where the global crash acted as a plot catalyst in the predecessor, here the sudden downturns and upturns feel ultimately immaterial, as of little consequence to the viewer as to the characters, wrapped up as they are in their love affairs. And as lovely as Gao Yuanyuan is once more, and as hard Louis Koo pushes himself (to great and perfectly absurd effect), Miriam Yeung absolutely defines this film. The dichotomy between her severe “queen of the stocks” status and the devil-may-care attitude with which she throws herself into love couldn’t be clearer, and her acceptance of Shen Ran’s proposal halfway through somehow feels both so wrong and so right.

That paradoxical feeling resonates throughout this, a disquietude that intermingles with the euphoria emanating from To’s visual confidence and his ensemble cast’s overflowing charisma. In a sense, this is to be expected: both Chi Yan and Genie, the octopus acting as a feebler but still wonderful stand-in for Froggy, display a consistent sense of “reverse thinking,” predicting the exact wrong thing, which proves great for sports and stocks betting but only muddles the waters further in the games of love. The continual sense of things being not quite right maps onto the sense of entrapment or limbo here, as characters enact the same scenarios over and over. But at the same time there’s such joy, such genuine astonishment on display; the last shot suggests at once infinite heartbreak, bitter defeat, and a feeling that the war is not yet over, and may never be over. In that sense, it’s a perfect sequel, in the sense that it consciously expands the original, inverting and altering it to enrich both parts. It feels so carefully considered, yet so inventive and energetic in the undertaking, that it exists both separately and apart, inextricable and yet fully, gloriously alive.

Asako I & II
Obviously have much, much more to say about this heartstopping masterpiece, but one of the most important aspects seems to be the sudden intrusion of the March 2011 earthquake, only hinted at by iOS designs amid the almost timeless/fantastical quality of the romances. Rather than grounding its surprising, almost radical approach to this odd love triangle, Asako I & II restrains itself to bounding and locating it, all the better to bring forth the flights of fancy. In a film filled to the brim with little details, feelings, and gestures, this act registers as one of the most quietly powerful.

A Confucian Confusion
The pleasures and interests in A Confucian Confusion are perhaps best expressed in two contradictory, yet not necessarily mutually exclusive, statements made less than five minutes apart: the categorization of Taipei as a small town and as a big place. Coupled with the opening statements the unusually direct intertitle (which in itself is counterposed with the elusive, mysterious dialogue snippet intertitles interspersed throughout) calling Taipei one of the wealthiest cities in the world, the impression is one of a space in total flux, befitting a milieu in which everything, no matter how seemingly settled and predestined the existing structures are. As always in Yang, the mercurial and unpredictable flights of human emotion clash with the glass windows and steel buildings: a theater director makes a swerve from postmodern abstraction to comedy, people fall in and out of love with almost alarming regularity, and people decide to seek other forms of employment. Yang, incongruously but perfectly, plays this roundelay of absurdity as farce, but there is a surfeit of scenes pitched at his usual, startling emotional level; if this doesn’t quite aim for a comedy of remarriage, the implications of its overall narrative feel deeply in kinship with his past work, with the comedy tradition, with the state of the modern world.

July 2019 Capsules

Ryan Swen Reviews Tags: Leave a comment

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
The genius of Lang lies in his ability to make even the most abstract, most incomprehensible moments totally concrete, representing the total paranoia of a man pursued in a tilt down matched to an oscillating soundscape. Arguably the reveal of the metallic silhouette behind the curtain is already redundant; Mabuse and the figures he possesses have already transcended the normal form, and yet they retain a distinctly material existence: etched scribblings onto paper, a rigged record player, neatly typewritten memoranda. The feeling is of total entrapment, of narrowly escaping one room only to become confined within another; even the thrill of a car chase in the night is subsumed by the rear projection.