Friday, August 18, 2017
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
The Confined Contentment
Regardless of the fact that as a teenager and also in my early youth, I was a hardcore metalhead, Until the Light Takes Us, had a great impact on me. Not just because, the documentary takes an almost in-depth look into the uprising days of Norwegian Black Metal, bringing forth its history, stories and legends, but also the way it depicts some social and existential situations. Following mostly three main figures of this extreme music genre - Varg 'Count Grishnackh' Vikernes (Burzum), Gylve 'Fenriz' Nagell (Darkthrone) and Kjetil 'Frost' Haraldstad (Satyricon) - the film captures three different human conditions and figural relations with the space.
Varg Vikernes, well-known for burning churches and murdering a fellow Black Metal musician (Øystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth of the band Mayhem) is interviewed and filmed at his cell in Trondheim Maximum Security Prison; An ideologist and paganist whose extreme actions has led him to this confined, isolated space, disconnected from the society - the society which he regarded as an Americanized/Christianized entity, almost deprived from its Norwegian roots and origins. During his trial in 1994, we can see Vikerness smiling at the courtroom, and even after about 14 years, his face and total gestures reflect a sort of unity and tranquility with his confined environmental space - Does he actually find serenity apart from the majority and the agonizing (capitalized) society?
Fenriz, is much more a hermit and a vagabond character; “more like a philosopher than an ideologist”, Vikerness says about him. We can see him as a music fanatic, a restless soul, always wandering around Oslo; An introvert flâneur heading into a pub, smoking and drinking beer. We mostly watch him in the film while he rides a train, walking slowly and heavily in the snow, or even moving here and there in his house. But despite of his restlessness, he obviously cannot trespass beyond an "average" scale of the space, he once goes for a Black Metal art exhibition in Stockholm but not further (except the phone-call that he’s interviewed by a female journalist from abroad). He’s not as isolated and marginalized as Vikerness, but he still inhabits his own world, disconnected from the society but yet within it - Is this why his face reflects such an odd fragility and dissatisfaction?
Frost, neither as Vikerness and nor like Fenriz, seems to be open to the world around him. He sees no limit in participating in a shocking performance at Galleria Laura Pecci. He heads toward Milan, searching and experiencing a larger-scale spatial environment. But that’s strangely moving what Frost’s facial, gestural and behavioral acts present in Until the Light Takes Us. As if like a wounded person, the further he travels, he welcomes more his own self-destruction. Is this a kind of existential revolt, when you cannot resist the society while you cannot accept it either? So the question is how possibly a marginalized and off-beat person can find contentment in the contemporary society, if not by his self-wanted confinement?
Sunday, August 13, 2017
Psychout at the Other Side of the Mirror!
It’s odd how Rossano Brazzi’s Psychout for Murder and Jesús Franco’s The Other Side of the Mirror, indirectly correspond each other. Adrienne Larussa (as Licia in Brazzi’s) and Emma Cohen (as Ana in Franco’s) are actually two astonishingly mysterious B-Movie queens struggling with the Electra Complex and their fathers in the psychedelic pop miasma. While Licia kills to find her way back to his industrialist father again, Ana is haunted by his father’s ghost who won’t leave her daughter alone; driving her to kill her lovers, so finally they can reunite at the border of life and death.
Two less-known examples of the carefree, untamable and heedless countercultural exploitation cinema, that prove how some films can affect and delight us by replacing lack of their coherent narrative and logic with upbeat, raw atmosphere and sensuality. Something that goes beyond massive electrifying techniques and structualizations. Rising right out of sincerity and restless rebellious spirit to wholeheartedly make films - not masterfully but maniacally.
Thursday, August 10, 2017
Girlfriends vs. Times Square
Coincidentally my last night viewing turned into a sudden double-bill watching. Watching Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends and Allan Moyle’s Times Square sort of led me to a comparative thinking. While the first, pinpoints a decline of an era, the latter manifests the uprising of another epoch. Although both concerning the issues of female friendship in New York, Girlfriends is focused mostly on the distance and separation of its two protagonists, Susan and Anne. A sad farewell to the deeming (hippie-feminist) idealism of the 1970s; A pre-mumblecore dealing with questions of personal/social despair and giddiness.
But, Times Square, as the other side of this coin, takes up where Girlfriends left off. On the contrary, Nicky and Pamela form an almost seemingly impossible duo, as two ill-matched teenagers from different social classes and backgrounds. And here, they can find same ambition and idealism to rock on by: Punk is there, and so literally the “Anarchy in the U.S.”
No wonder Susan in Girlfriends was so enthusiast of photography, as if it was the only way to capture and save what was disappearing right in front of her eyes; she should have taken pictures before all the ideals, dreams, and memories of the decade vanish into thin air. But the Moyle’s teens find a resisting bastion at the beginning of 1980's Times Square, they don’t save or capture, all they (need to) do is to shake the city!
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
An Experimental Summer Blockbuster
I have to confess that I didn’t expect such a joyful, lively creative blockbuster movie, to show up anytime soon. But James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, much progressive in its ideological undertones and almost rarely conventional in its aestheticism, turned out to be a complete surprise of this summer. Now, it seems as if the innovative aesthetical sparks (or ironically, the explosions) in the prequel film made a real “blast” here.
Diverse and multi-dimensional in lights, colors, shapes, sizes and movements, Gunn creates a magnificent unique universe of extravaganza wherein various characters of every figure and physique, type and genus dwell; evoking the retro sci-fi works of the 80s and 90s but surely not at all in a regressive sense.
Could we ever asked a contemporary CGI-based action to be infused with this amount of high-spirited humor and light-footed musicality, to deal with many aspects of the artistic experimentation in a genuine way? Well, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is the answer!
Sunday, August 6, 2017
A Voyeurism Without Gaze
Unlike the erotic
surrealism mastery of his peer-filmmakers such as Buñuel, Robbe-Grillet
and even Raúl Ruiz, Pierre Zucca in his Roberte (adapted from Pierre Klossowski’s
novel) tends mostly toward a “non-professionalism” and aesthetical economy.
Where the enchanting force of his work is driven by an atmospheric sense of strangeness
and oddity, an ambient surreality: a complex simplicity, when precisely less is
more!
Roberte takes place amid
the illusionary world of mirrors, theatrical backdrops and mysterious urban
labyrinths (Rivettean) which all perfectly reflect and encompass the vanity and
anxious bewilderment of her eponymous character’s psychological/mental space
and the masculine social bourgeoisie she’s entangled within - which can also provoke
apparent resemblance with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
Roberte’s sexual nervous
breakdown is split between various men, like her body which is chopped off of
its wholeness as Zucca applies many fragmented/detached shots of the hands and
legs to depict and convey this sense of corpo-mental shattered-ness. That’s why
the voyeuristic aspect of the film is never delivered as a complete uninterrupted
totally, and that’s where Zucca transcends the mere voyeurism to a higher level
of imaginative imperfection - a liberated eroticism rather a manipulative
pornography. Remember how the film by each step and twist is led to even
lose its sound and color at the end, closing with a graphical design of a
keyhole in the credits.
Pascal Bonitzer
remarkably mentions this aspect of Zucca’s work, when he accurately writes, In
Roberte, like all her postures and adventures, what’s evoked is a “crime
without violence” and a pornography without obscenity (Cahiers du Cinéma; No.
299, April 1979). So also I would like to add, a voyeurism without gaze.
Saturday, August 5, 2017
It's Alive!: An Introduction
Where to start?
Probably, embarking a project, whether personal or
professional, is the essential hardship of it. I would say a part of this
hardship stems right from the problem of “asynchronity”, because one seems can
really never start from this “zero degree”; There are lots in the background
and even a lot more in our personal arsenals filled with thoughts and films, with
burning desires and sometimes even unfulfilled passions and dreams. And there's no need to say sometimes how perplexing it can be, considering the puzzling fragments/moments of the presence and the future you're about to face with!
When to start?
But what one can do when he or she is haunted by sudden urge and
necessity to write and express his/her unspoken ideas, blasphemous thoughts and
relentlessly obsessive contemplations? So, obviously that’s the time you MUST
go with it and respond positively to this urgent need. Surely, it's not always
easy to know where you're heading to or what will you come up with; but as Walt
Whitman once said: “Strong and content I travel the open road.”
Why to start?
What’s the use of another blog in the middle of this chaotic-fast-pacing-network-reverie,
or who do I seriously have to expect to read this? Today, it seems we’re even
facing the end of the blog era (as print publications?); posting opinions on Facebook or Twitter is much
accessible, and easy for readers/friends/followers to react to and comment on. So this can be a
blog for both everyone and no one. A sort of Deleuzian “act of resistance” I
might say; but as far as it’s related to online cinephilia and blog-writing, it’s also a
matter of “act of persistent resistance”. So maybe like James Whale’s Frankenstein
I can, at least for now, shout with insanity and enjoyment: “It’s alive!”
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