Los más vistos géneros / tipos / orígenes

  • Drama
  • Cortometraje
  • Comedia
  • Documental
  • Crimen

Reseñas (536)

cartel

Anna (1975) 

inglés Directors Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli made a film set in the Roman counterculture of the 1970s (so it is not about the everyday life of the middle class). The underground content - discussions with friends about politics, open sexual relationships, clashes with the police, demonstrations, and life in a semi-legal state, on the streets - intertwines with an equally independent underground form that blurs the line between fiction and reality. The central plot, revolving around a segment of the life of a sixteen-year-old (approximately) prostitute picked up from the street by an altruistic forty-year-old, is set within an overall framework that at times resembles not only Cinema vérité, but also the "revolutionary" European cinema à la the Dziga Vertov group, meaning the breaking down of the wall between the actor and the character, the film crew and the world being filmed, the application of collective decision-making, etc. The viewer, in fact, almost never knows whether they are watching a staged, improvised, spontaneous/"documentary" scene, whether they are following the character or the actor who is already "playing" themselves and dealing with their own personal matters with another "character." In this aspect, as well as in its focus on the character of the modern young woman, the film resembles (a much more independent hippie) a version of I Am Curious (Yellow), and I Am Curious (Blue) by Vilgot Sjöman.

cartel

Anna Karamazoff (1991) 

inglés Does the title, referring to the Russian classics (Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov), create a framework for analogies and thus understanding the meaning of the film? No.) This film does not want to be bound by a coherent narrative and instead wants to rely on a chain of surreal scenes that depart from film realism towards emotional and atmospheric pulsation that aims to draw the viewer into the film despite its overall lack of meaning. However, the film is not just a completely free sequence of fragments of the author's subconscious, suffering from total discontinuity (a problem of many surrealisms) - in Khamdamov's film, there are many recurring motifs that run throughout the entire film and allow not only for a certain basic reconstruction of the temporal and narrative axis (although this is only secondary), but mainly to truly enjoy the atmosphere of the film or rather the atmosphere of the fictional world in which it takes place. It is a world that is typically "supernatural," timeless, sometimes mysteriously empty (the empty subway - in Russia!), and sometimes populated by strange characters in unexpected places; it is truly an imaginary world where "real" scenes can be replaced by scenes from another film (supposedly Khamdamov's Nechayannye radosti, banned by authorities in the 1970s and 1980s) without everything ceasing to make "sense," which is missing anyway...

cartel

Annette (2021) 

inglés Neo-Baroque lost its neo and only baroque remained, whose weight of gilded encumbrance may have been another bead in the rosary of genre-ironic creations of cinéma du look, but the repetition of the prayer mantra reveals itself here as a doubly double-edged sword, which Carax cut himself with this time: by repeating the form, its true power was diluted, the power of negation through a convention-incompatible form, to such an extent that the negation of negation (= form) evoked simple mathematics - multiplying two minuses gives us a plus, which is nothing but the valorization of the content itself. And in the content, I saw nothing but convention, to which only a different narrative vector and occasionally a comedic tone could not suffice to break free from it. Symptomatically, here, the undermining and playing with genre forms (musical, melodrama, fairy tale, etc.) is nothing more than something we have already seen in other more commercial works because such "postmodernity" has long been privatized by Hollywood. Hollywood has finally caught up with and absorbed Carax like a depth that is truly dangerous to look into because, from this perspective, cinéma du look can turn into cinéma du don't look. Neo-baroque always started in apparent kitschy sweetness only to turn bitter, but this transition was (in the best works) caused precisely by the inversion of conventions of given forms, while when we want to repeat this Neo-baroque dramatic arc only on the level of content, we always end up with nothing but convention sneaking in through the back door. Perhaps the transformation of the puppet into a living being was supposed to be an interpretive indication of the author's mise en abyme, with which Carax wanted to convince the viewer at the last moment that his film is not just a bloodless marionette swallowing the budget, but a work containing life, yet even in this final attempt (which is nothing other than a replication of Hollywood desires), he failed.

cartel

Antes de la revolución (1964) 

inglés PCI receives about a quarter to a third of all votes in elections, while the native Parma securely lay in the red fortress of Emilie-Romagna. It is the 1960s - three out of four intellectuals are leftists and May 1968 is approaching. The youths of the Italian and European bourgeoisie, raised by universities, await the revolution. However, as Bertolucci showed us, the middle class became, for a certain period of time, at best a mere compagnon de route (a companion on the journey) of the proletariat, from whom it soon distanced itself: the main character stands in the middle of a quarry, surrounded by naked bathing working-class boys, wearing a suit. During the time of this film, Bertolucci believed that he correctly captured the weakness of his generation and especially his class in a position of engagement in a matter that negates it through revolution. The isolation of the bourgeois individual (sex within the family only strengthens the idea of the inviolability of their class) incapable of establishing a real connection with the working class, on whose behalf he acts (for example, his connection with the proletariat passes through the mediation of an ambivalent character of a teacher, who is introduced to us in the narrative as an enlightened active individual, but on the screen later appears as a dull passive figure, equally isolated and living in the past). However, Bertolucci did capture, which only we can know retrospectively, the greatest tragedy of left-wing intellectuals or artistic filmmakers: the Godardian motto of style as a moral (political) choice, which Bertolucci explicitly puts into the mouth of one of the characters, concealed the belief of the impatient European bourgeoisie that revolution is a conscious negation of the world - a new form, a new way of thinking, and new editing. That is certainly true, but it forgets about the long, tedious, and surface material struggle. History has taught us that the spring breeze of May quickly subsided, new waves came and dissolved, the bourgeoisie found cozy spots, and Bertolucci started making Hollywood films. /// However, the muse of Revolution will give birth to beautiful unrest again and a fresh new perspective, as Bertolucci's early films demonstrated.

cartel

Apuntes para una Orestíada africana (1970) 

inglés Pasolini is a communist without progressive faith in economic modernization, nostalgically looking backward rather than forward, seeking authenticity in human life unspoiled by the empty greed of capitalist civilization. Pasolini finds a non-utilitarian way of experiencing the world either in the past (his work inspired by antiquity, later the Trilogy of Life set in the Middle Ages), or in the (lumpen) proletariat of southern Italy (a recurring theme in his work, strictly speaking, however, also - through the irreversible disappearance of this way of life in post-industrial Italy - belonging to the order of history), or as here - in the combination of both. Africa as the intersection of history and the present: the present symbolizing modernization in the form of pervasive consumerism, sparing no developing countries, which are presented as the only possible future; history as the experience of a time when soulless rationality and the utility of market society had no place alongside liberating irrationality, the uselessness of actions imbued with freedom, and naïve yet eternal connections between people and beliefs, traditions, customs, and religions. Africa as a challenge to the third world, fighting against imperialism and thus against the consumerism of the first world, in order to create a better future through the synthesis of the past and the present.

cartel

Archangel (1991) 

inglés When postmodernism suddenly awakens from amnesia and realizes that surrealism has been forgotten. The film is situated on many interpretive edges - from farce to imaginative questioning about the nature of human memory, and from a game with genres to multi-layered references to the history of cinema. It should not be forgotten that it is a quite interesting criticism of war: the film deliberately adopts the expressions of the wartime propaganda of that time for its overall framework of space and events, which occasionally creates delightful contrasts - anti-German slogans fighting against Teutonic barbarians framing the time and space of the film and standing against the personal search for emotion, the death of loved ones, etc. However, it is primarily a surrealist anabasis to the end of the world, wrapped in the retro black and white garb of silent films of the time, more so those German films rather than war or Soviet films (where the most famous product of Soviet cinema of the 1920s in the form of the montage school automatically comes to mind). However, Maddin adds some more historical inspiration to the postmodern urn - the noir genre. After all, the lonely hero with amnesia, in a hostile environment of a mysterious city, tracking his femme fatale at night and commenting on this self-destructive pursuit of solving the mystery through voice-over, is a classic fulfillment of this genre.

cartel

Arnulf Rainer (1960) 

inglés The zero level of film: its decomposition into prime factors - crushing its DNA down to basic bases. In other words: a return to the original foundations of every film experience, which is the interplay of light and shadow, sound and silence. This means that the prejudices and comfort cultivated by decades (and now more than centuries) of conventional bourgeois cinema are painfully disintegrating in the viewer, with unpleasant struggles that mean only one thing: a return to the degenerated sensibility of the viewer to the true roots of their perception. As they say - to bounce off the bottom, we must first finish the bottle - Kubelka has truly brought us down to the very foundation of film.

cartel

As Deusas (1972) 

inglés "A person has no fate or privileged place in the universe. If they didn't exist, nature wouldn't miss them." Khouri's privileged theme: the disintegration of an individual from the whole world into the monad of a useless human being; Khouri's privileged place: a luxurious abandoned hacienda, in a broader sense territorialization of the privileged theme to the privileged class - the bourgeoisie (and secondarily Brazilian). The universe of this film created by Khouri's successful mise-en-scène: the contradiction between the individual and nature, the anxiety of life and being simultaneously attracted to it as someone who doesn't belong; an island of a functionalist villa amidst a flood of greenery; solitude against the backdrop of the city. But above all, this monadic poetics of alienation leaves its mark in the framing of the human face by the camera which, with frequent details filling the faces of the actors, creates a claustrophobic atmosphere and emphasizes the inner and outer separation much better than the sometimes insensitive and exaggerated use of "oppressive" non-diegetic music, which, in my opinion, has aged the most in the film. If during watching I pondered why there are so many allusions to the 1920s in the film, it is perhaps due to their unsurpassable and beautiful portrayal of the human face, as only silent film could do, and which Khouri also used quite successfully, although in this film it leads the actors to a certain - but characteristic - lifelessness not only in their facial expressions.

cartel

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) 

inglés What does continuity speak of through a flood of discontinuous fragments from visual diary notes of one's own life, besides the author's own life? It is also one intertitle with a paradoxical message, being even more paradoxical as the film is at first glance, and according to the author's claim, purely personal - "This is a political film." This is a political film? Yes: the film presents the humanism of human life, adoration of the small everyday life not only in contrast to any great history but - and this is the second paradox - also in contrast to the author's own life. Humanism of the moment against any effort, always necessarily violent, to achieve greatness and the desire to leave a mark on the world and history, but above all resistance against the desire - equally violent - to ascribe any meaning to one's own life. Indeed, it is heroic to look back at oneself in old age and say: This means nothing. Everything that you see and that I see, is nothing. Everything is randomly composed, any statement regarding the interpretation of what you see and what is presented before my eyes in a cinematic memory, says nothing more. The more it tries to be objective, and even if it were the most objective (only place, date, time, context), it cannot provide anything at all, because it is about nothing because life has nothing to do with it. So says the author. For the author, there is only a feeling, a moment, the joy of the moment, which merges with the pure joy of filming whatever, because life does not have predetermined important or big events, but a moment of joy can arise from anything. That is why this film is the only film by Jonas Mekas that is worth seeing because it also provides an "interpretation grid" (if it makes "sense" to use this term...) for the author's other films.

cartel

Así habla el amor (1971) 

inglés The saying that all roads lead to Rome is just a self-deception of humanity believing in fate, through which it removes responsibility for its own tragicomical wretchedness - in fact, Cassavetes showed that there is only one way, leading to countless different goals. Similarly, Cassavetes can use the same cinematic language, the same artistic approach, and the same general relationship to life and the world, no matter what subject he films: he just needs to change the accent, emphasize a certain detail at the expense of another, add a touch of slapstick, and suddenly we have a comedy out of a drama. The viewer can momentarily forget that, on the contrary, his dramas have in the description of human dignified wretchedness their colossally ironic and funny dimension. No human journey ever leaves the dual tragicomedy of its one life path: staggering between the two poles of Kantian unfriendly sociability; denying the fact that a person can find happiness only in the bosom of others, which they continue to destroy and then can't help but wonder why they are alone among people and people are in the middle of them in their isolation... the path of words, the only path of words, which are constantly launched harpoons, with which we try to defeat the other person like a whale in a single gesture, while at the same time attaching them to ourselves. Words, always the same words, which are tragic once when Cassavetes lets a lonely character utter them in a filthy dump, and comical another time when, like here, he lets them scream at each other as characters of fateful lovers.