Parapalos, 2004
Ana Poliak

• The film opens with an extended shot of a naked man casually sitting on an hospital stretcher, waiting for, presumably, a physical examination. The shot is framed in a dark doorway and serves as an underlying metaphor for the film's examination of the hopeless, mundane routine of the poor and their objectifization (rather comoditization) as the sum of their body parts for their unaware (or indifferent) patrons.
• The role of the protagonist is really one of a good, amiable, disarming listener. He curiously listens to his colleagues tell their story (which might be a window to his own future). Not many, though, are curious about his own life.

Notes from Interview with Ana Poliak, May 2004:

• I wanted to talk about light, in the two senses of the word. The light of the sun and the interior light of a person. I wanted to show a character that had an interior light in order to think about how much a human being can be pushed and pressured in a job and how much he can resist thanks to his own light. These are questions, and I don’t have any answers for them....I think that my social class doesn’t have that capacity, that light...the main character, who’s almost mute, to work as a mirror; a character who, from his own light, is eager to listen to others, in whom who he awakens the need to talk and tell their life stories. He is curious about what the other people keep inside... I attempted to achieve a piece that was ...luminous and simple. I didn’t think of it as a recipe, but I did want it to be simple.

Los Muertos, 2004
Lisandro Alonso

• Opens with a sublimely beautiful shot of the camera exploring trees in some wilderness, occasionally going out of focus, generating a dream-like effect. Two (?) bodies of children are briefly seen.
• Vargas begins his journey in the boat, but briefly hesitates (he disembarks from the boat and heads back to the shore, hesitates and then decides to continue anyways). Is he afraid of himself, of his inherent primitivism, that has killed once and can kill again? (Or did he, perhaps, want to kill the fisherman who gave him the boat?) Was the first scene really the end of the film? (Alonso’s use of ‘opening credits’-like closing-credits insinuate at that).
• Vargas' primitive instincts are alive when he is freed from jaill – in his love for his daughter, in his interaction with the hive, in his killing of the goat, etc. His peculiarities include his walk, his manner of washing his face head downwards and and his cluelessness about his daughter’s possible age (buying candies without realizing that she would be much older).
• Camera used as a dramatic element in the long shot of Vargas rowing and receding from the scene, eventually disappearing, with the camera taking a life of its own, moving deliberately, with a rower’s exertion, in the opposition direction and, eventually, away from him (with only the sound of wilderness and Vargas' rowing in the background). The very same exertion returns at the very last scene of the film when the camera remains intently focussed on the toys (with incomprehensible sounds of slashing in the background). Is it the children, the goat, or himself (or just the audience) ?
• Beautiful, long expressions of "stillness" with sudden disturbances (reminded me of fade-out to black narrative ellipses in Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs: Bleu )
• Relationship between nature and the human race, and the inherent, but latent, violence in both. The hive, the constant sound of bees/flies are indicative of nature's intense upredictability. Unpredictability exists in us all.
• There is a beautiful part in the film when Vargas gets rid of his shirt (he has also got rid of most of his money), and we now find him dressed akin to his grandson. It is him coming home and accepting that he is now home. Previously, Alonso shows how Vargas is retracing many steps of his past (undoubtedly spent in the jungle), and his meeting his grandson brings a finality to his new found freedom.

Mondovino, 2004
Jonathan Nossiter

• Jonathan Nossiter uses the battle for the soul of wine as a metaphor for how "crypto-fascism" in the new "globalized" world order is destroying small-scale enterprises.. This is aided by a rampant complicity between the big companies and its' (so called) critics, in this case, wine producers and (so called) wine journalists. (Similar to the collusion that exists between film and film critics, politicians and political journalists, etc.)
• Not infrequently, the poet is greater than the object of his verse. Nossiter's absorbing documentary is in sharp contrast to the influential wine critics who assign numeric scores, while advising the very same vineyards on how to confirm to their 100-dollar-a-bottle "new oak" palates.
• This seemingly innocuous "homogenization of taste" is really a form of fascism where subversion of terroir is really a subversion of individual expression -- and affects (and reflects) both how we live today and what of ourself we pass onto the future...when our unique and defining imperfections (the very imperfections that make human beings human) are destroyed by economic greed.

Notes from Who is killing the great wines of Europe ? - Jonathan Nossiter on Mondovino by Mark Peranson (CinemaScope, Spring 2005) :

• "I'd like to send every filmmaker on a three-month stint working for a good winemaker with a sense of terroir...I'm deeply moved by the Burgundian notion of terroir as expressed by Hubert de Montille, which is that you express your personality in everything you do, in any activity, from a dry cleaner to a filmmaker. The Burgundian argument is that individuality is a given, stop fretting about what you're personally bringing to something, think instead about what you are able to bring out from something else..."
• "What I'm most interested in cinema is what I'm most interested in wine, which is what I'm most interested in people: the veins of imperfection that create idiosyncrasy and individuality. To me this is the highest form of beauty...And I think that in cinema we live in a world in which the way films are shot ... is becoming extremely plasticized, standardized ...The camera movement in Mondovino is never a premeditated aesthetic gesture. I hope that it becomes aesthetic because of human needs: the camera moves in relation to what I felt was being felt and being exchanged, and the moves were spontaneous. Organic. And I think that, by and large, a sensitive audience generally can feel when a camera is moving gratuitously, and for aesthetic effect, and for the glory of director's ego, and when it's moving out of human and dramatic necessity...it's filmed with a kind of ebullience, vitality, and playfulness, and that's how I felt making it and cutting it...Whatever technical imperfections, which are constant, are transformed by the vitality of the camera's curious eye and the vitality of its life within the frame."
• "With Robert and Michael Mondavi, that was absolutely formal interview, demanded by them, and I tried to frame it exactly like an interview, which I hope would take away from the interview aspect. And i think it did."
• "Whether you're talking about a wine, a book, or a human being, the moment we say we all agree on what faults are and how to eliminate them is the moment we have completely capitulated to fascism."
• "Making a film of any kind is a Sisyphean enterprise. Unless you feel deeply moved, and at some point unless you're in love."
• "I see documentaries as the tension between two people in any given scene (the director and the co-director - the person in front of you) - which is why for me Michael Moore is not interesting because I don't feel the other [co-]director present, there's only some big guy with a sledgehammer. Obviously, I'm using the camera to my advantage, the cards are stacked in my favour. When it's like that, the worst thing to do both ethically and aesthetically is to play a heavy hand. ...I showed some moments he [Rolland] wouldn't allow me to see, because that is part of the tension. And in his scenes, he is the screenwriter. As the editor and director, I don't literally interpret the screenplay, otherwise I wouldn't be a director. Any screenplay that is interpreted directly by its director is a dead film by nature."
• "If I'd done a film about the pharmaceutical industry, politics, or something that matters, I would never have got any sense of the human dimension....Precisely because wine is so irrelevant, ... I simply had access to everyone, and everyone was off their guard, even with their masses of press attaches."
• "The Mondavis, or Bush, or Parker live with a mixture of belief and layers of cynicism that they won't acknowledge at any conscious level. They live in a culture that allows them to believe in their delusions. This is personal jet-lag - the French have a word for it, decalage, which means "displaced", but it's an internal displacement."

Ren xiao yao, 2002
[Unknown Pleasures]
Jia Zhang-ke

• The in-construction Datong-Beijing highway is symbolic of a bright future, but Xiao Ji's motorcycle is going nowhere fast.
• The recurrent presence of the amusingly self-absorbed, operatic singer speaks volumes about cultural disconnection.

Notes from Lost In An Open Society by Dennis Lim (CinemaScope, Spring 2003):

• [An] empathetic tale of alienated youth, characterized by an unresolved mood of corrosive [almost bitingly sarcastic] statis.
• Trapped in disused, emptied-out spaces, Jia's characters find themselves constantly chafing against something - a feeling literalized in burts of repetition: Bin Bin awkwardly fending off a masseuse; a tearful Qiao Qiao being restrained by her mobster boyfriend; Qiao San's cronies slapping Xiao Ji to the pulse of disco strobes.
• Jia: "I feel strongly about maintaining an unbroken relationship between the audience and the characters, both with respect to time and space (and maintain a unity of time and space). From the perspective of the spectator, the feeling of the passage of time is extremely important. Even those long scenes where nothing is happening and it seems like everything has stopped, even those scenes are important. It's possible that nothing at all happens over a long period of time; it's also possible that a lot of things are happening simultaneously in the same space, and I love that juxtaposition. In my films, i never want to use an all-knowing time as if God knows what's happening. I want this feeling of waiting and of not being able to anticipate what's going to happen"

Notable selection from 2005 SFIFF:

Must Watch:

• The Forest for the Trees [Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen], Maren Ade
• The Hero [O herói], Zézé Gamboa
• L’Intrus, Claire Denis
• Kings and Queen [Rois et reine], Arnaud Desplechin
• Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July
• Los Muertos, Lisandro Alonso
• Saraband, Ingmar Bergman
• Tokyo Magic Hour & The Year of Living Vicariously, Amir Muhammad
• Pin Boy [Parapalos], Ana Poliak
• The World [Shijie], Jia Zhang-ke

Should Watch:

• Delamu, Tian Zhuangzhuang
• The Holy Girl [La niña santa], Lucrecia Martel
• Little Sky [El cielito] , María Victoria Menis
• The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, Adam Curtis
• 10th District Court: Moments of Trials [10e chambre: instants d’audiences], Raymond Depardon
• A Social Genocide, Fernando E. Solanas
• Ronda Nocturna, Edgardo Cozarinsky

ps: some notable omissions that i feel like cribbing about: there is practically nothing from all the remarkable work coming out of Japan this year, the absence of both Hou's Cafe Lumiere and Tsai's The Wayward Cloud, Eugene Jarecki's Why We Fight , blah, blah, blah, ...

Ni neibian jidian, 2001
[What Time is it There?]
Tsai Ming-liang



Technique:

• Slender and patient narrative made abstract by using very limited dialogue and camera movement.
• Remarkable rendition of a tourist's loneliness as Shiang-chyi, unable to speak any French, wanders alone through a cold Paris' cafes and cemeteries.

Notes from Time Traveller by Jason McBride and Mark Peranson (CinemaScope, December 2001)

• Tsai entwines the narrative threads, interweaving the events in Shiang-chyi and Hsiao-kang's irregular, yet quotidian, lives, moving towards a denouement that is equally cathartic and enigmatic.
• Opening scene shows Miao Tien sitting, waiting and smoking. But in a sudden cut, Miao's ashes are being transported through a long, dark tunnel.
• We're made to anticipate when someone will actually speak; anticipation of what a rare pan or track will reveal beyond the edge of the frame. But the anticipation burns in the characters as well, who wait, usually in silence, for relief to come in the form of a kiss, a proposition, a voice, a hand, or the return of a deceased loved one. (Hsiao-kang waits, we presume, for Shang-chyi to return, as his mother waits for her husband's reincarnation. Shiang-chyi just waits for someone to talk to.)
• But this anticipation is muted in the film. For most of the film, the anticipation that something will happen is replaced by the mourning for what has occurred.
• Cyclical ending, both literally and metaphorically (the symmetrical shot of the giant wheel, surreally resembling a clock) attests to the influence of Buddhism in Tsai's films: path to reincarnation involves suffering. Perhaps What time is it there ? can be considered a reincarnation of Tsai's oeuvre ?

Notes from Peter Bradshow writing in the The Gaurdian:

• The whole thing has such gentleness, reticence and intelligence...

Akarui Mirai, 2003
[Bright Future]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa



Technique:

• Lack of 'depth' in DV (distance between the characters and the camera) compensated by placing objects (columns of chairs leading up to the camera; a green plant close-up on one side with characters further away) between the characters and the camera.
• Extensive use of subdued lighting in interior shots interleaved with bright natural light in 2-way dialogues.
• The long takes sometimes register a slight hand-held tremble.
• Colours are sometimes halucinogenically saturated (a bowling alley of rich blues and greens; and shiny red balls)
• Use of lowlight grain.
• Exterior shots are bleached.
• Overhead shots reveal streets webbed with phone lines and power cables.
• Evening exterior shots, in natural light, of people looking inside lit houses where characters swim in yellow light.
• Stark contrast of protagonists' radical sense of fashion with that of the banausic world around them.
• Establishing shots mislead and demand to be recontextualised in retrospect: a dank cafe interior is shot through light when a 90-degree shot reveals it to be outside, on the street.

Notes from Ambivalent Future, Affirmative Nihilism - Notes on Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Indeterminacy Principle by B. Kite (CinemaScope, Winter 2003)

• The glowing jellyfish is as a good emblem as any for freedom, Kurosawa-style: deadly, diaphanous and mutable.
• Kurosawa Kiyoshi's films are a series of fluctuations between rigid and chaotic elements, grids in which emphasis is place variously on the lines and the spaces.
• The lines: a) hard angles of this long-take long shots sectioning the screen in balanced but asymmetric compositions; b) the confines of genre; c) habitual codes of consensual reality.
• The spaces:unexpected activations of elements within those strict compositions
• Kurosawa: "I think that most humans live with deeply repressed rage and hate. We are repressed by such things as conventions and morality."
• Critics seem to think that Kurosawa perversely abandons control at some point in his films and allows promising situations to dribble away into incoherence. I think the aim is somewhere else: combining traditional elements in unexpected ways to transcend habitual response to the ocean of conflicted and unnamed thought/feeling that lies beyond.
• The film returns at the end to a gang of teens, earlier rhymed with the fleeing jellyfish through an overhead shot of the group drifting , illumined by their glowing headsets. The Che Guevara shirts resonate on indeterminate frequencies: revolutionary sympathy or commodification of rebellion ?
• The extent to which indeterminacy is a guiding force at every stage of Kurosawa's artistic process is exhibited when he expresses an almost Bressonian refusal to either create psychologically defined figures ("I can't invent a character...with a reason for everything") or help actors find their way into a role ("I'm terrified that the more we talk, we'll clarify motivations, which I hate"). He searches, he says, for the proper balance between "freedom and form", so it's easier to make films "in and out of the conventions of genre."
• Much to the irritation of viewers expecting tidy twists on favourite formulas, Kurosawa's heroes move fluidly between positions, refusing to treat actions as blocks in a prefabricated narrative architecture. Any given occurrence functions as a pivot, opening new directions for movement.
  

Notes from Introducing Hou Hsiao-Hsien : A Deeper Shot by Phillip Lopate (Cinema Scope, Spring 2000)

• American scriptwriters are taught to make one point per scene and move on. With Hou, you feel your way into a scene, sorting as you go the characters' relationships and objectives. After a while you abandon your quest for the "key action" and surrender to the perplexing, multifarious life unfolding before you. In a sense, Hou's work is not difficult at all: you need only slow down your metabolism and submit to the pace, the images, the information onscreen. What he offers, finally, is a plenitude of life as it accumulates in the moment; the screen fills with being like water in a fish tank.

Depuis qu'Otar est parti..., 2003
[Since Otar Left]
Julie Bertuccelli

• Shot in the town of Tblisi in the new republic of (post-communist, modern-day) Georgia.

Le Pays des sourds, 1992
[In the Land of the Deaf]
Nicholas Philibert

• Can the deaf feel music ? How much does the sense of hearing define mental traits of rationality, logic and reason ? To what extent do the deaf attempt confirmity to the hearing world and to what extent do the hearing accommodate ?
• A moving and convincing portrait of society's misapprehension (and misconception) of the (often isolated, sometimes forcibly so) world of the deaf community.
• Philibert provides a compelling comparison between Jean-Claude Poulain, a brilliantly articulate (and addictively entertaining) deaf professor whose expression via French sign language is compared to a formalist 'oralism' teacher who develops speaking skills in children through repetitive exercises. ( A child playing the 'pacman' video game via modulated voice response is a memorable scene)
• The irony between painstaking attempts of the deaf to adapt to the hearing world, and the hearing world's facile efforts (and sometimes, facile tears) - readily manifested and often lacking sincerity or depth - is provocatively brought out.
• In the Q&A session, Philibert indicated that apart from making an effort to understand the world of deaf by being with them, filming for 9 months, he was drawn to the similarities between sign language and film. A scene well-articulated in sign language could well be an effective set of picture boards. A screenplay in sign language.

Film Watch

A Fei jing juen, 1991
[Days of Being Wild]
Wong Kar-Wai

• Spare compared to some of his later work like Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love in terms of colour, music and camera angles.
• Characters trying to transcend the mundane sorrow of their lives via their quest for acceptance.
• Utlimately unconvincing, almost catalectic. Perhaps blinded by love for the thematic strength of it's screenplay ?
• Nothing in Yuddy's character inspires chemistry (love, anger, hope, hatred, etc.) between him and the characters he interacts with (Yuddy & Su Lizhen, Yuddy & his adoptive mother, Yuddy & Tide).
• Attempt to create a melancholic atmosphere to depict characters' sense of incompletion with low lighting, rain and lack of colour contrast. But there is no intensity in the depicted melancholy, perhaps due to the colours used. Compare this to melancholy and longing beautifully realized in Kieslowski's La Double Vie de Veronique (sepia overlay) and Trois Couleurs: Bleu (blue imagery).
• Technique:
• Repeated scene of the slow moving, blue filtered landscape of the (Filipino ?) countryside.
• Interestingly, Tony Leung mysteriously appears in the last scene.

Mar adentro, 2004
[The Sea Inside]
Alejandro Amenábar

• Convincing premise and visuals, but a contrived resolution.
• Technique:
• Lyrical, fluid sequences depict Ramon's dreams. Extended, mobile aerial shot of the lush-green mountanious terrain, climaxing with a deliberate arrival at the sea shore.

The Bed You Sleep In, 1993
John Jost

• The contradictions between the striking, natural beauty of the almost desolate Oregon countryside with the desolate, depleted lives of it's inhabitants, interspersed with prolonged, disaffecting scenes in a lumber mill, creates an immense and persistent atmosphere of foreboding ill.
• Quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Every violation of the truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society". Parallelizes the transgression between father and daughter with the transgression between human society and the environment. A telling portrait of inherent contradictions in US society.
• Technique:
• Coloured (occasionally dis-coloured) still shot of Ray driving his car juxtaposed with high-contrast (over-exposed or bleached), almost black and white, mobile up-angle sequence of receeding trees and the sky (shot from a moving car) - such that edges of Ray's pale white face merge with the bleached sky.
• Conversation frame with two characters: tilted angle shot with one character in the mirror along with down-tilted-angle shot of the other character.
• Conversation frame with two characters: extreme closeup shot with one character to the left and the other behind to the right, at a distance. Focus shifts between characters midway the conversation.

Hwa yang nian hua, 2000
[In the Mood for Love]
Wong Kar-Wai

• Use of slow motion scenes juxtaposed with waltz music (by Michael Galasso) in the background.
• Intensely compelling portrait of claustrophobia, both external (crowded apartments and nosy neighbours) and internal (dread of failure of their illusory hope of the inviolability and invincibilty of thier marital relationships), using vivid contrast of bright colours. On the other hand, complete isolation of Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen during their direct encounters -- no other character is present when they meet, even in restaurants, signifies both their isolation from society and their shared attribute of loneliness.
• Reflection of the growing insignificance of the spouses in their prevaling lives using only the former's voices.
  
• Technique:
• Shot in episodic, fade-out, fade-in fragments which aids the (occasional) elliptical narration.
• Stylized camerawork:
• 2-way dialogues in Chow Mo-wan's office shot in uncommon angles (sideways and overhead)

Cinemarati critic Gabriel Shanks interviews critic Acquarello:

... I’m ...[making an]... argument ...[for]... how and why the film works, at least on a personal level. At the same time, I’m also trying to catalogue the films that I do find meaningful because it helps me remember the experience of them. So for me, the most efficient way to accomplish that is by dissecting the film and assembling the facts and detail observations in a kind of more clinical, scientific method application that removes the author’s personality from the equation. I think the approach also helps the readers to decide if it’s a film that will be meaningful for them as well, without insinuating your own personal filters too much into the reading. It’s certainly not a format that suits everyone, but neither is the subject matter.

...And I know it's cliché, but I'm still drawn to films about longing, and quite a few contemporary Asian filmmakers have turned this theme into an art form, most notably Tsai Ming-liang from Taiwan, Park Ki-yong from Korea, and Wong Kar-wai from Hong Kong.

Hai shang hua, 1998
[The Flowers of Shanghai]
Hou Hsiao-hsien

• Technique:
  
• Entirely filmed in the interior with low lighting:
• Subdued lighting on characters surrounded by opulence (costumes, architecture, etc.) depicts the dichotomy between their illusory life as entertainers (or their patrons) and the artificiality and fallacy behind their act. In a stunning form of visual dichotomy, one that uses the camera as a key dramatic element, the lighting functions as a transluscent veil that helps 'illuminate' the flower girls' internality (to the audience).
• Typical for Hou, filmed in extended takes that limits human actions and interactions to the business of day-to-day living.
  

La Mala Educación, 2004
[Bad Education]
Pedro Almodóvar



Quintessentially Almodóvar :

• Almodóvar has reached a level of visual refinement where he can be both bold and elegant (with carefully cultivated subtlety) at the same time.
  
• Life continues in his films in it's primal innocence - the bold, primal colours, the bold, primal characters and their bold, primal sense of humour.
• Overall construction is so sensual that it appeals to the senses like the lush sounds of some orchestra (as opposed to fertile/thriving/characterized by abundance/prosperous/plentiful)
• Full of ironical and whimsical double entendres.
• Surreal humor (having the intense irrational reality of a dream)
• Pulp narrative, usually complex like unusual interconnection between characters, films within a film etc. Very definition of 'pulp' in the truest sense of the word: lurid (shocking/melodramatic/sensational/causing revulsion) - subject matter with often shocking subjects portrayed as non-shocking.
  
• One is, still, not repulsed by the characters commiting lurid crimes. One doesn't see them as victims either, but accepts them as they are.
  

Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, 1972
[The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie]
Luis Buñuel

• Compelling portrait of the hyprocrisy of the rich.
• Technique:
  
• Repeated scene of the guests walking on a deserted road in the desolate countryside depicts the quotidian drabness of their, almost regimented yet aimless, lives that is isolated from reality of the common masses.
  

Film Watch

Chong qing sen lin, 1994
[Chungking Express]
Wong Kar-Wai

• Chase sequences depicted using stroboscopic motion.
• Wong Kar-Wai's fascination with time, a charateristic he shares with Hou Hsiao-Hsein, creates an interest in duration as an essential element of film. Juxtaposition of accelerated surrounding 'life' with slow motion sequences of characters reflects their (contemplative) emotional state. Wong frequently uses music or dispassionate voice-over narration by characters (instead or along with time) to the same effect.
  

Film watch

Vivre sa vie, 1962
[My Life to Live]
Jean-Luc Godard

• Technique:
• Stylized camera angles:
• The credits show Anna Karina's face and profile.
• Conversation between Nana and Paul shot at an angle showing their backs with the characters seated at the same table at a distance reflecting the distance in their relationship.
• Silent film intertitles are sometimes used for Nana, much like the film she is moved by - Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.
• Characters use windows overlooking streets/buildings as backdrop in many interior scenes. (Note particularly the 'interior-exterior' dialogue between Nana and Paul in front of the video overlooking the street in a video game parlour)
  
• Amazingly fluid camera movement as the bouyantly happy Nana dances around the snooker table. As critic Arquello points out "Godard's revolutionary camerawork serves as a cinematic extension of Nana's soul."

Stanford based Grade The News gave abysmal scores to bay area newssources, especially TV ones

Their grading criteria has 7 yardsticks that seem sensible:

1. NEWSWORTHINESS is based on two factors: 1) whether the story topicis "core" or "peripheral," and 2) whether the story is likely to havea direct and lasting (six months or more) informational impact on awide audience (at least 10,000 people).

2. CONTEXT measures the number of sources, and independent expertsources, in the day's top stories. An average of four regular sourcesor two experts merits an A.

3. EXPLANATION means big-picture reporting (about issues and thematictreatment of events) as opposed to episodic reporting (micro-view newsof isolated events that focus only on the event itself).

and others ...

It's cheaper and easier to fill a newspaper or newscast with reportsof seemingly random violence, fires, parades, reunions or evenfisticuffs between politicians than to treat a problem as an issue.All the sources necessary to harvest such a story are at the scene. Areporter can complete the story in several hours. And the drama or spectacle will draw readers or viewers across the region.

But such reporting leaves us mostly afraid, sad or perhaps feelinglucky to have avoided harm -- not informed of causes, effects andpossible solutions. Reporting violence episodically cultivates a sensethat nothing can be done.

Film Watch

Notre Musique, 2004
Jean-Luc Godard

Film Watch

Der Handler der vier Jahreszeiten, 1972
[The Merchant of Four Seasons]
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

• Technique:
• Reflection of uneasy relations using continuous, extended, panning shot of Hans having dinner with his family, with his sister at the head of the table - appearing literally and metaphorically out of the norm.
  

Film Watch:

In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, 1978
[In a Year of 13 Moons]
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Critic Arquello:

Fassbinder's familiar imagery of framing characters through rectangular passageways (particularly vestibules and doorways) that underscore their isolation is further magnified in the idiosyncratically hermetic image of Elvira traversing the corridor of a near vacant office building in search of Saintz that reinforces her profound, inescapable isolation. It is this image of the "outsider among outsiders" - a theme similarly explored in Fassbinder's earlier film 'Fox and His Friends' - that invariably underpins the desperate, inarticulable tragedy of the film: the systematic disembodiment of humanity and suppression of personal identity in the desolate reality of primal survival, pleasure seeking, material gain, and unthinking conformity.