Félix, a penniless teenager heading for where he hopes to find work in rural Argentina, is onboard a train that moves screen-left. With the conductor approaching, he jumps off; an overhead shot shows him walking ahead down the tracks. Now he is walking screen-right. This direction cancels the preceding ones, suggesting that Félix is heading […]
Daily Archives: February 15, 2008
Story-telling within the story we watch unfold: different perspectives; compounded realities. Seventeenth-century Japan; civil war has ended, eliminating some clans, scattering warriors to the winds of uselessness, demoralization, poverty. The samurai code prescribes an honorable solution: gaining entrance to a lord’s castle and committing harakiri. Tsugumo Hanshiro (Tatsuya Nakadai—his greatest role until Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, […]
Originally made as the 13-hour Out 1: Noli me tangere, Jacques Rivette’s subsequent 4¼-hour version (which is what I have seen), involving two theatrical troupes, is his most entrancing multilayered “created reality” to draw us into a self-referential dream of doubled and parallel existences. It duplicates its cast (including marvelous Jean-Pierre Léaud, who, when first […]
Dennis Grunes 