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Apologies: that should be 'Intimate Lighting'...
Misapprehending Tarkovsky
Tokyo, or something like it, in Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972 Aside from being a bit of a dick about it on Twitter, because being a bit of a dick about things on Twitter is kind of how it works for me in that format, I've been staying mostly clear of what the no-doubt very pleased new York T...
Just an addendum on Jarman's 'Blue', in case it is not common knowledge. 'Blue' was transmitted as a radio play on BBC Radio 3 at around the same time as it was released as a film. There is an apocryphal story that the BBC offered to send out plain blue postcards, so their listeners could get the full effect of the film...
I wonder, too, whether a taxonomy of 'boring' cinema might be an idea. In addition to usual suspects such as 'slow', 'repetitive' and 'incomprehensible', one could have 'inconsequential' (which would include wonderful films like Passer's 'Intimate Lightning' and Rozier's 'Du côté d'Orouët') and 'counter-intuitive', where the narrative (such as it is) simply fails to go in the direction that you, as a viewer, think it should. I've found that this last makes you resent the film while you're watching it but find it highly enjoyable in retrospect: for me, prime examples include Godard's 'Alphaville' and Akerman's 'La Captive'.
One could go on inventing categories, of course. I'd like to see one for Linklater's 'Slacker' and another for the Uruguayan film 'Whisky': friends of mine found both of these very boring. (In the case of 'Whisky' – to which one might add the films of Otar Iosseliani – is it possible to be TOO deadpan?)
Misapprehending Tarkovsky
Tokyo, or something like it, in Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972 Aside from being a bit of a dick about it on Twitter, because being a bit of a dick about things on Twitter is kind of how it works for me in that format, I've been staying mostly clear of what the no-doubt very pleased new York T...
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Jun 10, 2011
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