Jacques Tati’s final work, made for Swedish television, is one of the most poignant comedies in creation. Centered on a small, indoor circus performance and the audience in attendance, with rivulets of interactivity in either direction, Parade is a postmodern wonder—and a passing of the creative spirit from Tati, in his sixties, to two young […]
Daily Archives: September 8, 2009
Hakuchu no torima begins with “the nothing that is”: a white-out. Throughout, overexposed images appear nearly whited-out—one of several techniques that Japan’s Nagisa Oshima has borrowed from Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Oshima’s black-and-white film, also about memory-haunted existence, suggests the influence, too, of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958): the camera is fixated on […]
Dennis Grunes 