English Recursion Meets French Semiotics Lear is about sight and truth, and incidentally about how devilish charms (derived from the audience’s participation and perception) bend sight and truth. So it (and the similarly placed ‘The Tempest’) are naturals for film, especially self-referential films about films and filmmaking. Self-referential filmmaking is an art that the French… Continue reading King Lear (1987)
Tag: 1980s
Films released in the 1980s
The Falls (1980)
Borges Meets Hitchhiker’s Guide How Greenaway surprises. Here is an early work that is rich in ways that in later works seem submerged. The concept: A ‘Violent Unexplained Event’ occurs at 11:41 PM GMT, 14 June, People experience physical changes, often transitioning to birds. 92 new languages appear, and 92 birdnames are embossed in some… Continue reading The Falls (1980)
The Big Picture (1989)
Guest Travels in Search of an Ironic Formula As the child of intelligent film critics, Guest was poised to start a career in midstream, already aware of the dominance of irony in film. He would go on to develop and shamelessly exploit a specific, detailed formula for films about and using irony: the “mock” umentary… Continue reading The Big Picture (1989)
Begotten (1989)
Anal Ears This film is about its voyage into our minds, and it gets more competent as the steps get closer to us. The least artful element is the actual acting and shooting. The selection and processing of images is very nice. In fact, I used this (extremely slowed down) as the background of my… Continue reading Begotten (1989)
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)
Shoot Me When I’m Dead John Hughes. What a sad case: is it drugs? He started his career with huge promise: he made films that showed he knew how to dramatise the teenage world without using teenage bluntness. These were sensitive little things that impressed not by what they were but by how gently they… Continue reading National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)
Betty Blue (1986)
The Piano Sometimes a film makes a long, long journey. For me this happened in several ways. The first is in real time. I saw this a couple decades ago in the short version. I was unimpressed. The word on it then was all about the first scene, how it was supposed to be “real”… Continue reading Betty Blue (1986)
Miss Marple: At Bertram’s Hotel (1987)
The Space as a Character This is the sixth or seventh in the series that I have seen. BBC has a policy of putting different creative crew in charge of each one, so they vary significantly. I found the “Alien” and “Batman” franchises to be a mini-lesson in film techniques, and this is a lot… Continue reading Miss Marple: At Bertram’s Hotel (1987)
Beau-père (1981)
Music as Sex Nabokov’s “Lolita” is a milestone in literature — the narrator is obsessed to the point where anything he says is at least synthesised out of that obsession and at worse fabricated. It is only about sex in so far as giving a focus to the obsession of being. Here we have a… Continue reading Beau-père (1981)
Bad Taste (1987)
The World as Hamburger Sometimes, if we are lucky, a film plants itself deep in our souls and thrives there. Other times, a film is something different: an invitation to a party in the world of the filmmaker. In that case, it cannot touch you and as long as you know there is no danger… Continue reading Bad Taste (1987)
April Fools Day (1986)
The Opening By now you probably know that the meat of this is quite ordinary. It has an “it is all a joke“ sort of Scooby-doo ending. And this casts the whole thing retrospectively as a spoof of the genre. Not particularly interesting on that basis alone. But consider the beginning. When you stick close… Continue reading April Fools Day (1986)