SCREENING LOG - 1/28-2/03, 2002

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I watched Nostalghia and The Devil, Probably. Both of these films are indicative of two directors late in their careers, who clearly do not answer to anyone except their own respective conscience. These films are both highly personal and rigorously rendered, and thinking back on them now I should have done more than just try to fit them in my weekend leisure time. I liked the Bresson film more, perhaps because its themes coincided with the World Economic Forum protests happening this weekend.

Nostalghia (1983, Andrei Tarkovsky)

A Russian poet exiled in Italy comes to terms with his predicament through his interpreter and a local madman. This banal synopsis gives no indication of the visual and atmospheric beauty this film conveys with its colors, compositions and immense solemnity. It took me a while to warm up to this film but by the end it was all too clear that the personal integrity of this film makes it immune to criticism. When we bare our souls, we're bound to come off a bit ludicrous and self-indulgent. I can certainly admire it for its craft and persistence of vision -- it's just not one I am inclined to share, at least not at this point.

The Devil, Probably (1977, Robert Bresson)

I did a comments search for Bresson on this board for the past year -- believe it or not there are more comments for NOSTALGHIA alone than there are for all of Bresson! (and half of those Bresson comments are from me). But my tendency to stick for the underdogs isn't even a factor in why I prefer this film to Tarkovsky. It's quite telling that I prefer this film to early Bresson (i.e. DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST). I think what it comes down to is, I've become bored with transcendence. I'm just too young to rise above it all. And I'm fascinated with how Bresson started out as a transcendentalist but over his career became more fixated with the material world and the possibility that transcendence is a load of crap.

But before I get ahead of myself, let me summarize the film: a young man drifts through politics, religion, psychology, sex, all the insitutions of society, until he decides that he can bear no allegiance to any of them, and that suicide is the only option. It could be retitled MOUCHETTE IN THE CITY but there is a marked development from that film to this, most notably in how the material world, rendered in color, pulses with a vitality both alluring and oddly sinister. Now I can more fully appreciate his final film, L'ARGENT, which as the title would indicate was his most materialistic and least spiritually comforting masterpiece.

It's been said that Bresson's later films are too dehumanizing in their fragmented, mechanical depictions of people to be real portrayals of the human. This dismissal denies the challenge that Bresson issued to both himself and his audience. He doesn't trust conventional actorly emoting -- he wants his characters and his films to earn their pathos the hard way. This approach may not be for everyone, but there's no question that Bresson excels at it, and the level of filmmaking evidenced is a miracle of man and machinery in itself.

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