Duelle is one of Jacques Rivette’s dreamiest, most elegant, most evocative “created realities.” Unfolding in an eerily vacated Paris, symbolical and expressionistic, beginning on the last night of winter’s new moon, it suggests a level of unconsciousness that’s lit, sparingly, from a yet deeper level of unconsciousness. It begins with the sound of an unseen […]
Monthly Archives: February 2012
Out of the crack of the moon, a lizard slips, salmon-pink, brown-spotted, and is instantly devoured by my sainted cat. The walls, though upright, lie still; glasses touch, creating a ripple of sound, a touch of unease, the loss of an eye, the drop of the moon, a terrible song underneath the earth. We barely […]
The rough, powerful conclusion to his so-called Fascist Trilogy, Roberto Rossellini’s L’uomo dalla croce revolves around an Italian priest, a humble military chaplain, who ministers to the wounded and the dying, and Russians scrambling for refuge after being shelled from their homes, in a bombed-out shack on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. […]
Drawing narrative inspiration in large measure from Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), A Better Life revolves around undocumented Mexican immigrant Carlos Galindo’s hopes for a better future for his 14-year-old son, Luis, who was born in the U.S. Long since abandoned by their wife and mother, father and son live in a tenement shack […]
A “true” adventure recounting Norwegian Jan Baalsrud’s escape from German captors during World War II, Arne Skouen’s Ni Liv is beautifully framed by shots in a Swedish hospital corridor. The opening one shows Baalsrud’s assisted entry following an almost unimaginable ordeal during which he nearly froze to death. The closing shot shows Baalsrud, assisted by […]
Dennis Grunes 