A very strange and moving film, Au hasard Balthazar is the pilgrim’s progress of a saintly, downtrodden donkey in rural France. Indeed, Robert Bresson’s austere black-and-white film shows our world, or some segment of it, from Balthazar’s perspective. This world, the scene of the animal’s serial suffering, is cold, spiteful, cruel and criminal. Most people […]
Daily Archives: May 7, 2007
Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket claims one of the most stunning opening movements in all of cinema. The opening shot consists of a hand, a page and a pen at work on it, and voiceover, the aural translation of the script that the hand is generating; the camera is angled over the shoulder, and the voice belongs, […]
Father and Son (Otets i syn), which continues the trilogy begun with the dreamily beautiful Mother and Son (Mat i syn, 1997), won the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes. (The trilogy’s completion, Two Brothers and a Sister, is in the planning stages.) The citation accompanying the award read as follows: “For brilliant images and the […]
Reminiscent of the tragicomedies that marked the second and third tiers of achievement of the Czech New Wave that flourished in the 1960s until Soviet tanks, rolling in, crushed it (and much else), Divided We Fall (Musíme si pomáhat) is a patient, quirky, unmistakably Czech comedy. It unfolds during the German Occupation of Czechoslovakia during […]
Babí léto, a geriatric humanistic comedy from the Czech Republic, means “Indian Summer,” but it has been released in the States as Autumn Spring, which, as far as I can fathom, means nothing. It’s extremely slow, only rarely funny, but full of such sympathy for elderly persons that one cannot help rooting for it. Intermittently […]
Dennis Grunes 