Who passed by in the Parable of the Good Samaritan before the Samaritan helped?

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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: August 4, 2009 at 11:04 pm by Eve Tushnet

2009-08-04T23:04:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN?: The second disc of “Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ’30s” was bizarrely water-themed. It was also vastly less awesome than the first disc! Was this just me and my obsessions, or did the jesses really slacken on this disc?

Anyway, there was one short movie so amazing that it was absolutely, three hundred percent, worth sitting through everything else on the disc. Skip to H2O if you want to know about the only awesome flick herein reviewed.

Review of the first disc, part one; two.

Second disc:
Uberfall: Police report of an assault; plotty, doesn’t strike me as wildly experimental–? There’s a funny parallelism bit where a man paints a face on an egg and then breaks it in an egg-cup. …OK, it gets experimental (distorted faces, dice and other bits from earlier in the film looming up eerily) after he actually gets assaulted, to show the effects of the blow to his head.

La Glace a Trois Faces: French-accented English voiceover, lol. Three men in love with the same woman; their stories presented one by one. Bright Young French Things running around being champagne-y. Experimentalism limited to montage fade in/fade out techniques so far. …Oh ok, now there’s some neat stream-of-consciousness stuff with lampposts. …Wow, people in the 1920s really did not like lips! There are some aggressively-framed shots with geometric backgrounds—kinda obvious, but I like that stuff. In the same scene, there are some lovely bits of choreography e.g. a woman being pulled into the camera shot by her hand, or two men almost waltzing into frame as they light one another’s cigarettes. A great, creepy, low-slung shot of an elevator rising, making it look as if it’s traversing some kind of post-apocalyptic blasted warehouse landscape. Second segment: a monkey! There’s some great (original?) music, like a reverberating jew’s-harp; then, in the third segment, a more traditional skirling, longing sound, which apparently is a Vivaldi piccolo concerto. Great horror-movie music while the “intruder” (?) speeds past a danger marker… and then the Vivaldi again. And then possibly at the end all three men were really one man??? Do not understand that part.

Le Tempestaire: Seasick shakycam credits. Painterly shot-by-shot, like a Viewfinder, of a seaside village and its inhabitants. Low-key, slow-moving “she fears for her man at sea, so she goes to persuade the old witch doctor to work his weather magic once again” tale; some really cool shots of the sea reversing and calming. Several missing subtitles (including the last line!).

Romance sentimentale: Sergei Eisenstein. Intense, dramatic shots of the sea and falling trees, with the crash of branches paralleled to the crash of waves. Really great use of reflections and water-distortions. The music is original and mostly traditional with interruptions. Then we cut unexpectedly between a drawing-room with sculptures and a woman and a clock, and the leafless autumn forest. Then cheesy fireworks and more intense intercutting! …And then it’s spring for some reason. This is why I wish they’d translated the Russian song the lady sings. (Despite the Yalien colleague who always laughed, “Just learn the f***ing language!”)

Autumn Fire: Ehhhh, (nearly-) wordless love poem.

Manhatta: Sentimental-modernist ode to NYC. Tall buildings and little anonymous ant-people. Some nicely-industrial piano music, but otherwise, no.

La coquille et le clergyman: Slow movie is sloooooooooooooooow. Koyaanisqatsi is the freaking Micro Machines Man compared to this. It does seem to have a plot, but I truly can’t be arsed to figure out what that plot is—and bear in mind that I’m already the kind of person who will watch six and a half hours of “experimental cinema of the 1920s and ‘30s.” This is what you feared silent movies would be like.

There’s a bit where the clergyman is crawling around all scrunched up like something out of Freaks or Uzumaki. I really liked that part.

Regen: Rain in a small city, with pretty (new) music. At its best, the music sounds like if the Raincoats circa “Honey Mad Woman” seriously mellowed out and had no instruments but a guitar and bass, but there are noodly bits which don’t really go much of anywhere. Deeply nonessential, but painless.

H2O: Again with the rain! And then other forms of water, actually photographed in a striking, dynamic way, where each shot looks very different from the previous even though it’s all just… you know… water. People as obsessed as I am with sea metaphors might really get a kick out of this. Also people who want a lovely alphabet of textures and shapes, different forms of motion. …Wow, I love the series of cuts showing different kinds of rippling. It’s a primer on “how to film,” sure, but it’s a beautiful and compelling one. Ooohh solarization now! …Oh my gosh, I literally caught my breath just now. The solarized-Japanimation-silken-Rorschach-realist-staticky-molecular intertwining sequence of shots is just too much.

The (new) music is country-fried and demi-menacing.

This is by far my favorite from this disc. Again, if you’re less obsessed with this particular kind of image than I am, it may be your equivalent of “Manhatta,” but man, this was sublime. It’s the only film on both discs where I knew I had to watch it again because I’d missed things. (Update: I totally had. I was mesmerized the second time through; it was even better than the first.) And y’all: THERE IS NOTHING IN THIS MOVIE EXCEPT WATER. That’s talent.

It’s by Ralph Steiner, a name I do not know.

Even—As You and I: Holy cats, is that the Harry Hay? YES YES IT IS. The “Boy Meets Girl” stuff at the beginning becomes more satirical when you know this, though I have no idea whether that is the filmmaker’s satire or God’s.

Unfortunately this struck me as an otherwise-unremarkable “Surrealism comes to America” piece. He’s reading the paper upside-down! And when he turns the page there’s a bra! And he has a swastika and a hammer-and-sickle over his eyes! Yeah, no. I did like the bit where the high-heeled shoe gets stuck on the cactus.

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