by Aric HarrisonWhen Luis Buñel passed away in July of 1983 the New York Times described him as "an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary leader of avant-garde surrealism.” Throughout his career Buñel had meticulously crafted a style of experimental filmmaking that was as intellectual as it was visceral. Two filmmakers that praised Buñel for his auteur style were John Huston, who believed that, “regardless of genre, a Buñuel film is so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable” and Ingmar Bergman who said that, "Buñuel nearly always made Buñuelian films." One of the most Buñuelian sequences in all of his bizarre oeuvre is the ending of Simón of the Desert.
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by Israel lawton This year I have had many spiritual experiences in films. The first was in Robert Egger's The Witch, a film I saw twice in a week and was profoundly effected by each time. To a lesser degree I had a comparable experience in the less cohesive Knight Of Cups, though that film has stayed with me far less. However, by far the most powerful experience I've had with film this year was a quadruple feature at a fellow Cashier's apartment a few weeks ago. Though all four films were spectacular, (I had seen two previously), the first two films we viewed brought me to tears and fall in that rare but treasured camp of cinematic experiences that may prove to be truly life changing. The first film was a film I had not seen before: Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. The second is a film I had seen several months earlier, and was thrilled to see again: Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale. There is much to be written about these two films, indeed much already has, and I am currently working on an essay that will attempt to explain a more technical fascination with these films and attempt to discuss their successes more fully. However, the purpose of Notes on Cinema will be to keep a sort of cinematic diary, a collection of thoughts and experiences centered around the cinema I consume. I was brought to tears by these films, the process of watching the images edited in specific ways and played with sound changed the way I viewed my life, changed how i interacted with my co workers and family for days afterwards. I want to keep track of these experiences the way us writers do: by grasping at the straws of memory and winding them together into makeshift families or friends, then setting them on fire by casting them in stone. I hope to make this blog somewhere between journal, film criticism and film theory, as that is largely the way I live my life. When I see the last two minutes of The Squid and the Whale play out, either on screen or in my head, I feel my eyes well up with tears, and I see my whole life summarized and explained in perfect detail, the way I never could, even to a close friend. However, what causes this to happen is a great mystery of mise-en-scene: my parents never got a divorce, nor did they even fight much when I was a child. My upbringing was far from idyllic, but it's disruptions and chaos did not stem from any sort of conflict between my parents. However, despite this, I feel a constant desire to exhibit the last few minutes of Baumbach's film as a perfect summery of my life when i was 18. And this gets to the occult magic of it all: the bizarre assumption that we could only connect to stories and other art if it mirrors our experience; taken to it's logical extreme meaning that all art would exist along the perimeters of race, gender, class and age, something that I find not only disgusting but also almost unheard off. So my experience with The Squid and the Whale thus becomes a simple but deeply personal example of the lasting power of art: how something so simple, so obvious, can become world altering, life changing and reduce someone to tears. A few nights ago I was at another friend's apartment and attempted to explain the sensation of remembering every exact detail of a perfect moment, the shadows cast by wall hangings, the color of the picture frame on the table, the way I moved my hands, so that I could recreate it perfectly again if I needed to. Films such as the one's above seem to be the result of such strenuous observation; the ability to create something so personal it becomes surreal. In short, this project is an attempt to do just that: to recapture perfect moments with cinema. by Jack BrownDivine interchange for the wolves of society, sentinels exact vengeance;
completing a circle of wrongdoing to justice with no rumination of possible redemption. The fatal flaw (or hamartia) is often an early cue that the actions of the anti-hero are morally despicable as well as dismissable to the public at large due to invariable punishment that is sure to proceed. This punishment of a plainly bad individual satiates our societal expectation that unfavorable action is met with a penance. |
ContributorsThe contributors for Cashiers of Cinema are a menagerie of creators devoted to Radical Aesthetics. Meetings are held at the dumpster behind Winkie's. Archives
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