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| Before Midnight |
10/06/13
Watched a double bill of Before
Sunrise and Before
Sunset. Their beautiful perfection puts my own work to shame.
12/06/13
Went to the BFI to see a
collection of Thanhouser's Early Cinema Adaptations. I guess the emphasis is
on early (they spanned 1910-1913). I really liked two of the five they showed.
It was a good evening too – there was a Q&A and introductions to each film.
Glad I managed to make it along.
14/06/13
Saw Before Midnight. I'm not
sure if it was quite everything I wanted, but I still loved it. It was just a
little different from what I was expecting. Maybe expecting isn't the right
word – I'm not sure what I was expecting – I just mean that it feels different
from the other two. If anything, it almost feels closer to Slacker and Waking Life in
its freewheeling conversations (at least in the first half – the second half
reminded me more of Tape, at least in
setting). More than anything, what struck me was the sense of being reunited with
old-friends – which is testament to how well Linklater, Delpy and Hawke have
crafted their characters. It's also very funny. Perhaps the funniest of the
three. Looking at them as a trilogy, it's interesting to note how they get more
sexually explicit as the trilogy progress – and therefore as the actors get
older. It feels like the reverse of what you'd expect in more conventional
filmmaking. There's a sense of magic and mystery in the first two which are gone
from this one, which also feels like it's down to the age of those involved (a
product, perhaps, of what their life experience has taught them). But as much
as it's missing the magic, it could be this very absence that makes this one
special, and what makes it work on its own terms. It doesn't feel like a gem in
the way the first two do, but I think time will prove it to be equally memorable,
and equally profound.
15/06/13
Went to the BFI for a double bill:
The Act of Killing and White Elephant. At times, The
Act of Killing seems almost
like a fictional satire of genocide power – but it's not, it's a terrifying nightmare
of reality. There's no denying the film's outright power, but I felt throughout
that it could have been more probing. It's only late in the film that it starts
to examine the 'why', and even then it feels like it needed to go further, to
build a fuller psychological portrait of its participants. For instance, when
Anwar begins to awake to the full impact of his crimes and express surprise at
how his victims felt, why didn't Oppenheimer ask him how he thought they felt?
Was Anwar really only realising their fear for the first time? Making men such
as Anwar confront their pasts is a worthwhile enterprise – but something needs
to be got from it. It feels wrong to be overcritical of a film which draws
attention to such barbaric acts in such a powerful way, but at the same time
there is something a little disturbing about the whole enterprise. Not only is
there a lack of real insight (psychological or political), but at times it
feels very constructed (for one thing, the timeline of events is never clear). In
all, a very powerful film, but a problematic one also – but maybe that's okay.
Maybe by being problematic, it causes us to scrutinise it more closely, and thus
engage even further with the issues it raises. White Elephant, meanwhile,
suffered from a slightly undefined narrative trajectory, by which I mean it was
unclear what it was building to (and, indeed, the ending was a weird mix of multiple
ending-syndrome and extreme abruptness). But it was never less than engaging, and
Trapero is a filmmaker who really
knows how to use the camera – and when to cut.
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| White Elephant |
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