Soshun (B&W/144')
the film shows the life of several freshly graduated white-collar workers, trying to keep a social life together, organizing trekking days off, playing mah-jong, sticking together to help one of them behaving immoraly... a young couple is drawing bored: the wife goes to her mother when the husband wants to go out with his co-workers for the weekend. the husband is seduced by a secretary on one of these weekend, but isnt even passionately attached to her. his wife suspects him and watch him closely (lipstick on his clothes, fake excuses to sleep out...). One of his friend is very sick and they wake him. Meanwhile the secretary is trying her best to deny the gossips around their relationship, despite the pressing investigation (with formal interrogatory) of her co-workers. an hilarious scene of the husband coming home in the middle of the night with 2 of his friends drunk dead, they talk politely to the wife who is excessively annoyed.
the husband will be offered a promotion in a small northern remote town, and his wife let him go alone. but an old friend (Chishu Ryu) might eventually talk her into making up. this ending in the industrial country town, connected by railtracks, with still shots of chimineys and trains is particularly beautiful.

The Eclipse
Funny I'd swap the titles between L'Avventura and L'Eclisse... where the real eclipse is in L'Avventura and the love affair is in L'Eclisse.
This film should be called 2 hours with Monica Vitti ! There is tangible love between Antonioni and Monica Vitti in every plan, it's orgasmic. She is a sex symbol and is used as such, a glamour object of desire. Each scene is an excuse to film her under a new angle, her legs, more feet , her face, her mouth, her eyes... But it isn't just show off, as Antonioni uses a lot of suggestive framing, cutting out Vitti's body in pieces, with often back shots, or Vitti hiding her face behind her hair. Vitti gloomy, Vitti clueless, Vitti laughing, Vitti temptress, Vitti seduced. The "playing negroes danse" scene is memorable!
The sexiest shot being her exiting the cab in a roman street outside the stock market, we can hear impatient cars honking and Monica Vitti, medium shot, turns to us full screen, look into the camera and does that pout with her hands pushing away, meaning "hey shuddup, calm down, will you?", and walks away with a superbe confidence. What a woman!
Almost as lovable as Audrey Hepburn, only darker. And certainly sexier than Brigitte Bardot or Anna Karina!
Outstanding opening sequence! Probably one of the most powerful of cinema history. We are thrown in the middle of a break up scene, at dawn, after a nightlong tearful discussion (never disclosed to us). Yet the tension in the air is as thick as if this was the ending sequence of a 2h film when we are totally familiar with the characters. They don't talk much and every move tells a long lasting love affair is irremediably over and dead. The silence between them is uncomfortable to us too. Again the mise-en-scene of the whole scene is incredibly inspired! The way characters are shot separately or blocking each other in the same frame, The dialogue is pointless, the body language matters most, and this embarassed feeling to simultaneously want to rush out in disgust and stay out of pity. After more painfuly worthless words this is the end, Vittoria beguins the film with a page of her life turned, loaded with a hurting emotional guilt, desillusioned by love.
Then the film introduces us with the stock market ambiance which seems a totally random choice of context... the materialistic nature of the golden boy (french lover Alain Delon) being terribly stereotypical all throughout. That is where the distanced cynism from the Nouvelle Vague can be found. A little heavyhanded but well captured description of the market business in a superbly flowing sequence.
The rest of the film is deliciously cut into womanly slices of life, with Vittoria playing hide and seek with herself, with love and with Piero, expressing great many concerns in her soul without overstating them. Pictures and mise-en-scene show the inconciliable distance between them, their opposite personality, the impossible love, the irrepessible urge to love or be loved. Highlighted with "mots d'auteurs" aplenty, intellectual reflexions about men, women, love and life. And funky plans like the child crossing the road before them, the gunshot in the air balloon, the kiss behind the glass, the mimic of lovers they saw in the street (all this is very Nouvelle Vague!)
The episode with the woman from Kenya, the negro dance, the poddle chase is quite deconcerting. I'm not sure I understand the full meaning behind it.
The ending sequence is a fantastic photography manifesto! consisting in a 10 min long slideshow of night footage around teh block where they used to meet. Not only this is a beautiful way to end a film without dialogue, without even the main characters, in a pure aesthetic statement (which I believe is the main point of the film entirely) but it leaves the love affair open ended, and us pondering on the next move of the protagonists.
While watching these magnificent shots of scafolding, architecture details, city scape, light study... it reminded me of Bergman & Nykvist's manifesto in Persona prolog made 4 years later.
quibble : italian tradition to post-synchronize dubbing... which makes terrible ambiant sounds, and unfelt dialogues.

with Catherine Deneuve, Sami Frey, Anne Parillaud (as a kid).
Deneuve is a detective hired by a rich and mysterious physician living alone in his mansion. meanwhile a sect is suspected to use a powerful radio beam that freezes people in place from distance. the common friend of the detective and the scientist, who put them in contact, produces radio shows and seem to be connected to all this as well. a surrealist film that bends time and space, but the script is a very bad TV Columbo with funny Kung-fu scenes with Deneuve as WonderWoman

a B&W artfilm version of our favorite japanese TV serie... Electric Dragon 'Morrison' is a young guitarist who has been struck by a 80,000 Volt power line when he was kid, this woke up the dragon that sleeps in all of us, in the reptilian brains. He loves reptiles, and wears lizard-leather pants, and his hair stand up on his head. His nemesis is Thunderbolt Buddha who has been struck by a 20 million Volt lightning when he was kid. He wears half of a Buddha mask on the right side of his face (split persona).
They want to exorcize their electric demon, the classic ultimate fight ensues. Fantastic!!! Highly recommended. No line spoken in the film, a trash narrator yells out the few fiery-animated inter-titles like "Don't **** with my guitar!!!", "Why did you drive me mad???"...
A creative cinematography using original angles, speed-up motion (like in Burst City), night scape, light-tracks on film...

typical british crime film investigation à la Hercule Poirot, adaptated in Benares, with a famous detective, his assistant, and a famous crime writer on vacation who are led to solve a mysterious theft. Ironical homage to comics books superheroes and detectives as being iconic pairs who fight for justice with their brains. Delightful.

Realist story of a rebel teen orphan moving from one foster family to another. Admirable work with non-actors deep down in the vivid life of country folk.

The story of an orphan girl, Jeanne-Marie, who lost her father in a battle in Algeria during french colonialism. Her mother died of sorrow. She runs away from an unfriendly boardschool and is kidnapped in the street. Unusual attention to lighting and mise-en-scene for this early time.

DOCU
a serie of interviews of people in Iceland who see invisble beings like trolls, goblins, ghosts, aliens and the people of the rocks.
amazing culture and country. the photography is surreal too.

B&W - Silent - 22'
Delicious surrealist experiment featuring all the funky artists from the french dadaist movement : like Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie, Man Ray... full of symbols, mutations, magic tricks, delirious logic of events, death and life as one!
written with Picabia, showing off a richness of visual tricks using overlaid images, power cuts, smoke screen, inversed shots... only fun! :)

The Spirit of The Beehive
it's a masterpiece of cinema history. and a marvellous trip into the realm of childhood. these 2 girls give a great performance too. (Fanny and Alexander comes to mind for similar success in working with young children)
i loved the light, and the sepia tint. dialog is almost invisible, and the pictures talk for themselves, in the manner of a silent movie (genre hinted at the beguinning by the screening of Karloff's 1931 Frankenstein). the pace is slow and the plot undersignificant which leaves time for the observation of the seemingly harmless routine, and room for our personal fantasy projected on this travel backward in our own childhood. the tension builds up little by little when small unsignificant events stumble into the peace of this quiet life. anything could happen in this stalling atmosphere, suspended in time.
images tell us about this wordless world of imagination, the gap between individual personalities: 2 sisters, daughters and parents, husband and wife, father and mother. images speak out loud what people cant confess to eachother.
the space impregnate a structuring character into childhood memories. the village, with characteristics houses: the town hall, the classroom, the station. and the desertic road from home to school, back and forth, crossing the dangerous and captivating railroad. the immense house, with endless corridors, and huge doors.
the office of father and all his stuff we are not allowed to touch when he's around, but that we manipulate with malice when he turned his back. all this and daddy's beehives...
all beguins with the cinema, and the haunting question a child asked and didnt get an answer for. a question about unjust death, about contradictory evil/innocent deeds... there must be a great mystery behind this if nobody can answer, and this is already a tramatic experience that will print its mark for life.
the spanish civil war themes are so subtle, and people so oblivious/reserved about it all that it might almost go unnoticed. the war is sometimes invisible, and untold. the tragedy vanishes overnight, and the corpses as well.
politics and violence is so absurd to children anyway... more critical existential problems are to be solved!
Erice remains outside the story, distant, without taking side. like a child is a stranger in the world of adults.
beautiful landscapes in fixed plan-sequence, exploration of the scenery, travel in the night... and awesome close up of faces and their thoughts.

a very cute babe, violonist, seeks to recover sight through an eye transplant, and a young psychologist will help her to rebuild her visual memory. the psychogical distress due to the operation and the "opening eyes" is a very sensible rendering. but now she "sees dead people" like M. Night Shyamalan would say... and like a theme developed in Almodovar's "All About my Mother", she will research the identity of the eyes donor, a poor (and even cuter!) babe from Thailand.
"Jian gui" the second feature (after Bangkok Dangerous) of the brothers Pang, Oxide and Danny, from Hong Kong, give us a decent remake of Blink (1994) with Madeleine Stowe.
the great opening credit generic give the high standard for the photography. too bad the content is rather weak and so cliché.
but the images are superbs and the storytelling ability can be meaningful and scary at times.
we can only wait and long for the next opus, hopefuly more personal!