Reviews

Six Feet Under is along with Twin Peaks the only remarkable and the best TV work ever done so far anywhere. Six Feet Under has been created by Alan Ball, the screenwriter of American Beauty.

"When I was 13 years old, I was in a car accident with my sister, who was driving the car. It was her 22nd birthday, and she died. She died in front of me. She died all over me. Death stuck its big old ugly face in my face and my life changed. That's why death seems to be a theme that appears in all my stuff."

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Alan Ball has managed to create an art-house TV series which is only comparable to Twin Peaks. However Six Feet Under has no less than 63 episodes in five seasons since 2001 until 2005. The series features great performances from less-known feature films actors but who became famous for their performances in the series as well as in other TV productions.

The narrative of the Fisher family and its family members' starts on the Christmas Eve of 2001 when Nate, Nathaniel Fisher Jr. comes back from Seattle to L.A. to join his family for the holidays. His father dies on the way to pick him up being crashed by a bus. For four years the series unravels the quests for love and happiness of the Fisher's and their friends, lovers and acquaintances.

Nate suffers a brain stroke two years after his father's death which makes him reconsider his life. His wife will die after they began their marriage and he will die three years after his first major stroke leaving behind two little daughters, a wife and his family. The end of the series fast forwards to show us the deaths of all the major characters in the series.

The soundtrack of the series features classics like Coldplay's A Rush of Blood To The Head and Radiohead's Lucky and ends with no less emotional and powerful Sia's Breathe Me.

However this is not an unhappy end. It just follows the line of the series' idea with a twist of course, but one could see that the end of the series is not that depressing as the series may seem at certain moments especially towards the end with Nate's death.

For me this series reinforced the fact that every second alive is a great and terrible gift that we must take but not take for granted.

It is a great film of hundreds of hours and along with Twin Peaks is the only really watchable TV work ever made.

"Cinema is dead, long live the cinema!" said Peter Greenaway, one of the most innovative and productive contemporary directors, at the last year's Romanian film festival Anonimul, which got to the third edition and takes place in the Danube Delta. This year the direction prize went to Jafar Panahi's "Offside". I got to see it this evening in Bucharest at the festival's retrospective. Cinema is dead but still very lively. Panahi's film tells in a compelling manner how Iranian society looks. Digitally filmed, "Offside" is a story inspired by a real-life event happened to Panahi's daughter: the trouble and risk took when decided to attend a football match. This is forbidden in Iran as we are informed. What Panahi manages to do is to render with few means, but with, probably, a lot of work, intelligence and humor the cultural patterns in a society that places women at a distinct level. The absurdity of the laws becomes comical. The film has a happy end, after all because Iran's team goes to the World Cup. What I appreciated most was the concept, the idea behind this film. I would be very interested to see Panahi's other films that were forbidden in Iran as well. I guess that he can be thought as an activist director.

"I'm dilated 10 cm. My heart is full. " This is how a 70 minutes discourse ends. Lukas Moodysson called his newest work "a black and white silent movie with sound". The sound is a stream of consciousness discourse that comes to challenge the visual. Images and words combine to render emotions, feelings and thoughts. Questions of homosexuality, transgender personality, abortion, faith, depression, suicide, the misery of postmodern civilization are raised. What sense can someone make in this depressing world? A man in the body of a woman and a woman in the body are living among the remains of a failing world. Religious icons are mixed with plastic fetuses and with human bodies in strange postures. A collapsing world is living inside of the man. The man lives as well in a space that is made by the remains of a glamorous world. Pop culture icons, religion, mass media, war, terrorism, cancer are the stable points of the world that he lives in. Homosexuality is a public disease. Jesus is inside Mary's stomach.

With this film Moodysson challenged some of the most powerful cultural stereotypes that are influencing actual societies. At a certain moment among a huge amount of trash you can see a postal paper bill with the Romtelecom logo, the Romanian public telephone company. Romania is referred several times, directly or indirectly. The most accurate reference is made through the association between Roma people and Romanians, when the character speaks about the roommate that s/he had in Madrid. He was a Gypsy, which means a Roma, but soon he denied it stating that he is Hungarian. However his mate didn't believe him. Apart from this stereotype I mentioned there are some more important ones.

Religion is put face to face with issues that are challenging its importance in nowadays societies. You can see all along the film several Christian Orthodox icons. They are frequently associated with plastic fetuses and it is obvious that this questions the relationship between Church and abortion. Homosexuality and transgender issues that are one of the main ones come to face again the religion.

Pop culture icons are referred continuously in the film raising the problem of the influence that pop culture has in contemporary society. Why is the girl depressed? Maybe because she doesn't look like Christina Aguilera and she will never can. That's why she gets into antidepressants and psychological therapy and she harms herself? Only to realize that every teenage girl does just the same. She's so common after all and she wish to die. The whole world looks like a world of Apocalypse. Nuclear disasters have been replaced by a more powerful threat. Cancer is everywhere.

What can you say when you see such a film? Personally I consider it to be a masterpiece. Moodysson is one of the few directors who are truly experimenting with the cinematic language nowadays and manages to create a highly original and groundbreaking work.

Regarded as a masterpiece, Eisentsein's October is a very complex and rich film. It is also difficult to watch because it is a conceptual and experimental film as well. The conceptual part of it comes from its very nature, because of the fact that is a black and white film, and black and white rendering of cinematic or photographic reality has a certain conceptual value. Peter Greenaway declares it to be the first cinematic masterpiece in his "book of cinema".

The richness and complexity are linked to the huge amount of visual information, which ranges from masses of people to art works like Rodin's sculptures. This visual setting is extremely spectacular: impressive statues, large exterior views which encompass roads, bridges, canals, masses of people and armies, extended interior views, beautiful decorative objects and art sculptures. With all these things Einsenstein creates a spectacular visual universe.

Michael Haneke illustrates Franz Kafka's manuscript for the novel bearing the same name, in his film 'Das Schloss'. We can call it a cinematic rendition of the plot. The film begins with the scene of K. entering the door of the inn, which commences with the still image of a mountain village posted on the door. Consequently the film ends unexpectedly in the middle of a scene which presents K. walking to the horse stables waiting to find Gerstäcker's mother reading. It's like you read a text and you stop where it stops. This illusion is perfectly staged by Haneke.

However, it is a film and not a novel. You cannot control the point where you would like to stop. You cannot read again a paragraph; everything is rendered linearly, in a narrative form. Basically, in this instance the film as a medium encompasses the novel. It would feel inappropriate to say just that about this film.

What is remarkable in Haneke's work is the way he recreates the absurd universe of Franz Kafka: by using long static shots, lack of conversation, abrupt ending of scenes and arranging all narrative elements to express in every moment a state of insecure and temporary state of facts.

The image is outstanding in terms of expressiveness, at least. There are lots of nuances of blue and brown and the light is used very carefully to create special types of dark settings resembling Rembrandt's paintings.

The actors' performance must be highly credited, especially in the case of Ulrich Mühe and Sussane Lothar who are playing K. and Frieda, respectively.

If making films is about relying on other artistic forms, especially on the novel and if you believe in the concepts of mimetic and cathartic art, then at least you have to come up with something outstanding in these terms. Michael Haneke manages to do this because his very own approach of film-making.