La chimera.Around 1655, a group of rural laborers were excavating a field in Norfolk, England, when they dug up a collection of ancient urns, small clay vessels filled with ashes, bones, and various grave goods: combs, tweezers, brass plates, and a blue opal, possibly once set into a ring. More than a thousand years before, this field had served as a cemetery, and if not for an agricultural accident, it would have remained unknown. The find so impressed the scholar, doctor, and writer Sir Thomas Browne that he began his 1658 Urne-Buriall with the following: “Nature hath furnished one part of the Earth, and man another. The treasures of time lie high, in Urnes, Coynes, and Monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables.” He marveled at the survival of these fragile vessels, which, though “in a yard underground, and thin walls of clay, [have] out-worn all the strong and specious buildings above it,...
- 3/29/2024
- MUBI
Street by street, block by block, city by city, bombs fall. From way above, from the anonymous bombers’ point of view — which frames a hypnotically long nighttime sequence in Sergei Loznitsa’s new archive documentary — kilotons of explosives fall like rain, sprouting insignificant little splashes of fire below. It’s the most obviously abstract segment of a film that more often deals in crisply restored imagery of rubble and ruination at ground level, but it feels emblematic of the overall effect. Even with the roaring crescendos of Christiaan Verbeek’s deliberately intrusive, often overwhelming score, “The Natural History of Destruction” is frustratingly equivocal, maintaining a curious, lofty distance from the horrors of the civilian war experience. Its most interesting ideas plume briefly, only to fizzle out like far-off firecrackers.
The austerity of Loznitsa’s approach is hardly new. Eschewing narration and instead letting recently unearthed footage do the talking, embellished with Vladimir Golovnitski’s scrupulous,...
The austerity of Loznitsa’s approach is hardly new. Eschewing narration and instead letting recently unearthed footage do the talking, embellished with Vladimir Golovnitski’s scrupulous,...
- 6/13/2022
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
It’s Halloween time, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that you’ve heard some Edgar Allan Poe verse in the past few weeks. “The Raven,” most likely. If you had been alive during the time when Poe was still living, your chances of hearing “Once upon a midnight dreary…” would have been just as good.
“‘The Raven’ was a massive hit. [Poe] was a huge celebrity during the time ‘The Raven.’ Everybody knew ‘The Raven.’ People did parodies of ‘The Raven.’ Kids memorized it in school,” actor and literary superfan Denis O’Hare explained in a recent interview
In Eric Stange’s new PBS film “Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive,” O’Hare plays Poe in surreal, reimagined moments, performing the writers’ work to empty rooms and slinking through the streets of Poe’s eventual home city of Baltimore under cover of darkness.
Read More:Ken Burns,...
“‘The Raven’ was a massive hit. [Poe] was a huge celebrity during the time ‘The Raven.’ Everybody knew ‘The Raven.’ People did parodies of ‘The Raven.’ Kids memorized it in school,” actor and literary superfan Denis O’Hare explained in a recent interview
In Eric Stange’s new PBS film “Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive,” O’Hare plays Poe in surreal, reimagined moments, performing the writers’ work to empty rooms and slinking through the streets of Poe’s eventual home city of Baltimore under cover of darkness.
Read More:Ken Burns,...
- 10/30/2017
- by Steve Greene
- Indiewire
The Open City Documentary Festival, taking place across London between the 5th and 10th of September 2017, will present three films by Belgian filmmaker Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd: Lost Land (2011), For the Lost (2014) and The Eternals (2017). The films, shot mostly on 16mm and Super 8, are poetic essays exploring the lives of those affected by exile, conflict, loss, and the ecology of harsh environments, hauntingly soundtracked by British Avant-Garde musician Richard Skelton. Ahead of the festival I interviewed Vandeweerd concerning the aesthetic and thematic connections between his films, his anthropological approach and the role of language in his cinema.Notebook: You’ve studied anthropology, amongst other subjects, and you’ve worked as a teaching assistant in a Philosophy and Literature department. What led you to utilize filmmaking as an extension of your research? Pierre-yves Vandeweerd: The first area I worked in as an anthropologist, at the beginning of the 90s, was Niger in West Africa.
- 9/4/2017
- MUBI
“Man is a wolf to his fellow man,” quotes a character early in Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature. The ordeal suffered by its protagonist will indeed be solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish – it won’t be short, however. Powerful though bloated, A Gentle Creature is a companion to Loznitsa’s phenomenal first narrative feature, My Joy, once again following a person’s nightmarish odyssey through an allegorical rendition of post-Communist Russia. Though not as successful as its predecessor, Loznitsa’s latest nonetheless confirms the director’s place of honor amongst cinema’s most vociferous critics of Putin’s kingdom.
A Gentle Creature might borrow its title from a short story by Dostoevsky, but the relation between the two is even less apparent than between Loznitsa’s last outing, Austerlitz, and the W.G. Sebald novel of the same name. A much more obvious literary influence is Kafka. In lieu of an impenetrable castle,...
A Gentle Creature might borrow its title from a short story by Dostoevsky, but the relation between the two is even less apparent than between Loznitsa’s last outing, Austerlitz, and the W.G. Sebald novel of the same name. A much more obvious literary influence is Kafka. In lieu of an impenetrable castle,...
- 5/25/2017
- by Giovanni Marchini Camia
- The Film Stage
★★★★☆ "We who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead." This quote from W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz proves a useful reference when considering Sergei Loznitsa's new documentary of the same name. The film takes its title from the German author's book, but to suggest it's an adaptation would be misleading. Rather, Loznitsa's enigmatic and thought-provoking piece is in dialogue and concert with many of the ideas and facets of Sebald's text; the blending of fact and fiction, architecture as history and, most notably, the complexity of collectively remembering the past.
- 9/15/2016
- by CineVue
- CineVue
Writer and academic W.G. Sebald once said: “Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” In truth, an animal understands nothing of its place in the world, their mind focused merely on food and the prospect of comfort, if available. In cinema, there is an old actor’s adage that states: “Never work with children or animals. They will always upstage you.” When an animal performs successfully in a film, it’s undeniably captivating because we know that animal is unaware of its role in the overall story. The camera has recorded some beautiful cosmic miracle, appearing from the outside to somehow defy Sebald’s words.
Whether fictional friend or foe, the relationship between humans and animals in cinema has always captured our imaginations. These sometimes expand beyond the borders of the normal, and, beyond the Bourgeoisie pooper-scoopers and barked-out cry conveying that some hapless child has fallen down a well,...
Whether fictional friend or foe, the relationship between humans and animals in cinema has always captured our imaginations. These sometimes expand beyond the borders of the normal, and, beyond the Bourgeoisie pooper-scoopers and barked-out cry conveying that some hapless child has fallen down a well,...
- 6/23/2016
- by Tony Hinds
- The Film Stage
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