RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
|
Post by RNL on Aug 14, 2009 15:53:29 GMT
A beautifully shot art-prank by a filmmaker with nothing interesting or truthful to say.
Contains some inspired imagery unlucky enough to find itself in such an inane context.
|
|
|
Post by svsg on Aug 14, 2009 16:03:40 GMT
disappointing to know, I was kind of looking forward to seeing it, if and when I get a chance
|
|
|
Post by ronnierocketago on Aug 14, 2009 16:34:25 GMT
A beautifully shot art-prank by a filmmaker with nothing interesting or truthful to say. Contains some inspired imagery unlucky enough to find itself in such an inane context. How indepth review of the Anti-award winner at Cannes. ;D
|
|
RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
|
Post by RNL on Aug 14, 2009 16:54:44 GMT
I don't write reviews, no one reads them.
|
|
Capo
Administrator
Posts: 7,847
|
Post by Capo on Aug 14, 2009 19:38:31 GMT
I would! If only in the hope or assumption that others read mine.
|
|
|
Post by ronnierocketago on Aug 14, 2009 22:08:18 GMT
I would! If only in the hope or assumption that others read mine. I read yours. But really RNL, is ANTICHRIST truely bad or just....fucked up random?
|
|
RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
|
Post by RNL on Aug 14, 2009 22:18:57 GMT
It's pretty bad.
|
|
|
Post by Valenti on Aug 15, 2009 1:34:36 GMT
Sounded gross. Smashing testicles with a wooden block and all that.
|
|
RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
|
Post by RNL on Aug 19, 2009 20:50:22 GMT
May as well paste what I just wrote on Facebook:
The little bit of praise it's been getting has been for the attempt to dramatise 'grief', 'pain' and 'despair', but surely any honest attempt at dramatising those emotions wouldn't involve arbitrarily sending the characters up into some figurative 'Eden' to deal with them. When people experience those emotions they do so in the context of their real lives. It's just easier for the dramatist if it's made really abstract, I suppose. Like it's 'purer', or something, if they're in the woods on their own. But actually it just makes it trivial, it makes it impossible for the film to be insightful, because there's no social context at all, the only things he leaves himself the possibility to comment on are vague abstractions like 'Man' and 'Woman' (and 'grief', 'pain', 'despair', etc), which are meaningless without some social/historical context.
Not too keen on Trier at all anymore really, I still think Europa is great, if just stylistically amazing, but he seems more interested in how his films reflect on him than in how they reflect on the world/life/people/something more interesting than him. It is beautifully shot though, and there are some great images in there, but they're just wasted in such an uninteresting narrative context.
Trier has said Zentropa was struggling financially and he deliberately set out to make a 'commercial' film. I suppose the surest way for him to do that was to make a 'shocking' sort of highbrow art-prank that would upset the right people, but that was also marketable as a genre film.
By the way, I now feel similarly about Mother & Son, though I believe that remains a good film despite that glaring dramatic flaw.
|
|
Capo
Administrator
Posts: 7,847
|
Post by Capo on Aug 19, 2009 21:05:47 GMT
tl;dr lol
|
|
RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
|
Post by RNL on Aug 19, 2009 21:11:49 GMT
It was tl for the comment box anyway. ;D
|
|
|
Post by quentincompson on Aug 20, 2009 7:49:49 GMT
so your against metaphor in general because that's what it sounds like you're saying.
|
|
|
Post by Anasazie on Aug 20, 2009 12:16:40 GMT
I think the problem.....as usual......is with wanting and needing to break every single aspect of the piece down to an intellectual argument, statement or very specific meaning in order to think it's good or to connect with it.......RNL doesn't seem comfortable with a film that he can't do this with and therefore understand specific intent on the part of the maker. The comments above on Antichrist remind me of past comments on Godard films from RNL and as with those comments, just because you can't break a piece of art down to black and white, analytical, academic, very specific meaning, doesn't always mean the film is shit or isn't working, it can also mean you don't understand it and it's gone over your head or you just haven't connected with it. Is that always the film-makers fault? Europa is Von Trier's most specific film and in that i mean with it's meaning, what's trying to be expressed is very straight and very obvious and very clear. In Antichrist or Epidemic or most of Von Trier's other films, it's far from clear, it's tongue in cheek, it's contradictory and it's very much open to interpretation....as all the best art should be!! It should be beyond intellectualising and beyond breaking it all down to mere words. As Mother & Son is, a film i have never even attempted to analyse, i just remember it and it stirs my emotion when i do, same with I Don't Want to Sleep Alone.....do we think or feel in words? No......so let's let some things be and not bring everything down to our stupid language level! Rant over....soap box back to Wettie
|
|
|
Post by Michael on Aug 20, 2009 19:04:07 GMT
By the way, I now feel similarly about Mother & Son, though I believe that remains a good film despite that glaring dramatic flaw. When was the last time you saw Mother and Son?
|
|
RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
|
Post by RNL on Aug 20, 2009 21:56:16 GMT
And round and round we go.
QC, no, that's (obviously) not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that it's impossible to say much of anything substantive about something like 'grief' in the abstract, because the experience--the human condition--of grief always occurs in a social-historical context. So Antichrist is about the grieving process of a middle-class American academic woman after the death of her child, and her husband (arbitrarily) takes her up to a cabin in the woods, and this is where her grieving process plays out. Von Trier wants it to be about 'Grief' and 'Woman', but that's complete baloney. There are universal properties to the phenomenon of the experience of grief (like the neurochemicals that cause it, for instance), but not, I would argue, to the experience itself - that's unique to each individual and that uniqueness is determined by the uniqueness of the social context in which the grief is experienced. Of course individuals are not utterly unique, and it's possible to generalise from specific cases, to make wider social insights from the analysis of individuals' experiences. So no, I'm not "against metaphor", even imagining trying to adopt that position makes my head spin; half our lives are metaphor. That was even a metaphor.
Anasazie, let me disabuse you of a notion you're fond of firstly: everything is open to interpretation, and we use our wonderful human intellects to do that. Thinking and feeling aren't antagonistic opposities, your cognition of your experience of the world is what causes you to feel. If anything their relationship is dialectical, one affects the other all the time. What you're really refering to when you talk about films that are "open to interpretation" is films that follow a particular trend towards a noncommital ambiguity, which I believe is popular with the middle-class 'cinephile' elite precisely because it's intellectually unchallenging, it doesn't engage critically with life so the delicate bubble isn't disturbed. There is a premium placed on addressing the 'elemental-universal' aspects of the human condition, and this is because to address the 'elemental-universal' is to address nothing in particular, especially when it's meant as an exclusive address; when the filmmakers feel the need to stress over and over that they're not making political films, that they have no interest in politics (again, Sokurov and his Hitler/Lenin/Hirohito films). This isn't a personal judgement, this is an observation about systemic pressures exerted on those of a particular social class to develop certain cultural values. But of course consiousness of these pressures is a precondition for resistance of them.
You've never given any critical thought to Mother & Son, and it's enough that a film "stirs your emotions" when you remember it in order for it to be considered a great film. Not wishing to be offensive, genuinely, but I can only see the adoption of this position as a symptom of self-involvement, a disinterest in much of anything outside your own emotional experience. What else could it be? And it seems like it must even be quite a superficial self-involvement if you're not even interested in why you might find the film so emotionally stirring, but of course any investigation into that would require an analysis of wider social questions, which you're apparently not interested in, or which you'd at least prefer cinema to be quite separate from (and, of course, it isn't).
Why is it that these kinds of films are so popular? My theory is that it's the other end of the postmodernism spectrum, where the perceived superficiality and decadence of postmodern art has worn out certain segments of the middle-class 'cinephile' elite, and left them desiring something more emotionally engaging, something with a sort of depth of feeling about it, an air of humane weightiness, etc. The problem is that the postmodern conception of history as a discontinuous 'storehouse' of images and ideas and iconography remains the conception of history that this audience is most familiar with, so it's quite natural that films that float nebulously free from history and seem blissfully unaware of the existence of any social forces, like Mother & Son, that have an air of 'anywhere anywhen' about them, and yet are nonetheless seemingly deeply felt, find such praise. Yet it is really a different flavour of 'escapism'. 'Escape' into an ahistorical dreamscape of Big Emotions, as opposed to 'escape' into a world of superheroes or wizards or robots or whatever.
What is the very straight very obvious very clear 'meaning' that Europa is expressing? I'm not suggesting there isn't one. But can you tell me what it is?
Also, I'm not really interested in philosophising with you over language, but all this quasi-spiritual, anti-intellectual and frankly vague-as-all-hell talk about breaking things down, reducing them, etc, to "mere words" is really just puerile, a facile catch-all anti-argument. Is your argument always that we shouldn't be arguing at all, regardless of what the argument is about? It's like a watery kind of anti-scientific romanticism. In fact it's more than puerile, it's actually reactionary, because it's anti-critical. An anti-critical position is a position of absolute complacency and therefore complicity in that which you refuse to criticise. Your position is that all critical discourse is lamentable, that 'understanding' has nothing to do with the communication of knowledge but is rather something that you either have or you don't. Dubious theory to say the least. Let's say you decide that you love Antichrist, and you decide for yourself that you 'understand' it without giving it any critical thought or considering it in memory as anything more than a passing emotional impression. Now let's say I decide that I hate Antichrist, and I decide for myself that I 'understand' it without giving it any critical thought or considering it in memory as anything more than a passing emotional impression. What's to stop me telling you I 'understand' it, and that it's bad, and that you therefore don't understand it, because you think it's good? We're not allowed to engage in critical discourse. We're not allowed to discuss the internal logic of the drama, we're not allowed to discuss the socio-economic conditions under which the film was produced. We're not allowed to discuss the possible social-historical roots of the film's style or the ideas it touches on. And I've said this before, but 99% of the time when you do try to articulate an opinion on a film it amounts to nothing more than a list of adjectives. I'm sure I could easily respond with a list of different adjectives.
Understanding that is of value to those other than yourself comes mostly from investigation, analysis, reason, etc. Those most reviled of human qualities, that gave birth to civilisation, and all its technologies, including cinema. This kind of understanding can be passed on to other people, using words and sounds and images. It is ghastly, yes. (And yes, we do think in words quite a bit.) I must say I got a chuckle out of the notion that we might bring things "down" to the level of our highest mental faculties.
Jee-aysus. Look how much I wrote.
See I prefer this to writing reviews.
|
|
RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
|
Post by RNL on Aug 20, 2009 22:23:32 GMT
By the way, I now feel similarly about Mother & Son, though I believe that remains a good film despite that glaring dramatic flaw. When was the last time you saw Mother and Son? January 2008. It's a lovely little film.
|
|
RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
|
Post by RNL on Aug 20, 2009 22:31:07 GMT
A further thought...
Why would you place such value on a film being "open to interpretation" if you're not interested in interpreting it?
|
|
|
Post by quentincompson on Aug 21, 2009 3:58:02 GMT
I'm not really on board with you that the experience isn't universal. The experience of a character in a film is naturally going to be different than my own, so why does it matter if it's put in it's social context? What can I get out of thinking about a social context that's irrelevant to my own(or is this impossible)?
Ultimately there is an overlap of emotion that I can connect with, which allows me to reflect on my own feelings in real life, of which I'm not always breaking down specifically and any cathartic response of anyone to an piece of art is a confirmation of this.
When you respond emotionally to art how does it affect your admiration for the piece? If you do have a strong cathartic reaction to a film and later through analyzation you come to disagree with the filmmaker's intent(say like Antichrist) do you dismiss this response entirely.
I think I understand what you're saying I just disagree with your aesthetic opinions.
|
|
RNL
Global Moderator
Posts: 6,624
|
Post by RNL on Aug 21, 2009 15:24:55 GMT
As I said, there are some apects of grief that are objectively universal, such as the neurochemical triggers, and maybe to a greater or lesser degree certain physiological reactions (people tend to cry, for example). But let's take two women who suffer the accidental death of their child. One of these women is a single mother who lives on the poverty line and loses her only child, she must continue to work her two jobs without missing a beat, and she has access to little to no social, psychological or medical support to help her through her grieving process. The other of these women is affluent and belongs to a large family, she has a spouse and several children who share her grief, and she has access to all the psychological and medical aid that the first woman doesn't. No, their experience of grief over the deaths of their respective children is not the same, in fact it is different in all the ways that matter. In life and in drama it's the same only trivially.
I suppose it doesn't matter whether it's put in a social context if all you're interested in is yourself and your own emotional experience, since your cultural background already predisposes you to conceiving of history and society in a way that facilitates your emotional connection with ahistorical dramas that purport to deal with the essentialisms of an elemental-universal human condition (NB: so does mine). Again, not wishing to be offensive, but how else can I be expected to read this? The characters in the drama don't exist to shed light on the world and life outside of the bounds of your own experience, rather they exist merely as vessels to service you with emotional catharsis. Is this what you're saying? It appears to be. If not, please clarify.
When I said Antichrist offers "no social context at all", that's not true. It'd be more accurate to say that Trier tries very hard to socially decontextualise his characters and turn them into abstractions of elemental-universals and essentialisms like 'Man' and 'Woman' and 'Grief' and 'Pain', etc. In fact he's unable to do that, and this means that, as I contradictorily stated earlier, "Antichrist is about the grieving process of a middle-class American academic woman after the death of her child, and her husband (arbitrarily) takes her up to a cabin in the woods, and this is where her grieving process plays out." Of course the film's attempts at psychologising are self-defeated by its attempts at social decontextualisation, since, of course, human psychology is mostly determined by social life.
|
|
|
Post by Anasazie on Aug 22, 2009 2:22:46 GMT
talk talk talk talk, and the point i made has been proven, don't you get bored of talking and analysing and dissecting? Don't you have to like go to work or do something or something?.....speaking of social context....isn't Mirror one of your wetpants films? A piece with less social context than most.
|
|