Film | yalpertem

Blutsauger (2021)

“As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.” (Marx, 1990: 342)

I watched this one in my new favorite laid-back and friendly cinema, Zukunft. Two weeks ago, I watched Heikos Welt (2021) with some loud and drunk people. It doubled the joy of the film for me. The film felt like a less political and dart-fueled version of Herr Lehmann (2003), maybe because of the audience profile. Seeing Blutsauger was my second time in the same saloon, Saal 4, which has three rows and twenty-five seats. This time I thought I’d be alone watching the film, but just before it started, two people joined. Now I have a favorite seat where I can quickly go to the toilet or grab a beer in under one minute. I’ll keep going there. The person who checked the ticket gave his comments to me about the film, which was a lovely moment. It has been a long time since someone working in a cinema talked about the film to me.

I saw this one while looking for a film to go to on an empty day. The “Marxist Vampire Comedy” part interested me; an unexpected mashup. The director Julian Radlmaier has some earlier films he directed, I haven’t seen those, but the titles are inviting: Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa (2013), Ein proletarisches Wintermärchen (2014) and Selbstkritik eines bürgerlichen Hundes (2017). I was reading some interviews, and my impression was that Marxism intellectually inspires the director, as if he was benefiting more from the theory than political action. The film also supported this impression.

The film takes place in Germany in 1928, where a so-called (ex-)”Baron” from the Soviet Union arrives at the Baltic seaside. A factory owner, Octavia, welcomes him and invites him to her house. In an augenblick, it becomes apparent that the traveling man is no Baron but a worker trying to make his way in the film industry. His actual name is Ljowushka. He has some acting experience in early Soviet filmmakers’ films, primarily in Eisensteins’, who appears several times in the film. A film-lover candy from the film’s early scenes: the figuration actors are discussing the best filmmaker pitching Vertov and Eisenstein or Pudovkin and Kuleshov against each other. A follow-up to that scene might be Baron’s ‘meaning of life’ tirade focusing on the break times in a film set where a total procrastination and rest opportunity arises. I have no experience or observation of film sets. Still, I keep hearing in the actor interviews that these sometimes disturbingly long pauses and breaks are a definitive aspect of the work. I thought that it might be why they included a part about it in the film to capture a holistic labor experience.

I also don’t know much about vampire films, but I thought this one does not provide a lot of genre film treats. The first vampire film I saw might be the one we saw at the cinema with mom when I was 7 or 8. I recalled that it had Leslie Nielsen and found out it was Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). It should be a ‘meh’ b-movie, but I still remember how hard I was laughing while watching that as a kid. The next one after that might be the Interview With The Vampire (1994) that I saw during my high school years while getting to know cinema a bit more with the well-rated movies on IMDB. Other than these, the personal honorable mentions might include From Dusk till Dawn (1996), Blade (1998), What We Do in the Shadows (2014), or Penny Dreadful (2014-2016).

Even after Ljowushka’s identity is revealed, the house owner Octavia insists on him staying in the mansion. Meanwhile, the butler of the house, Jakob, also enters the story as one of the storytellers. There’s like a love affair between these three characters. They decide to shoot a film funded by Octavia which can show the qualities of Ljowushka as an actor. It’s a vampire film, maybe inspired by the recent hit Nosferatu (1922), but I don’t recall a reference to that one. Maybe I just missed it along with the hundreds of other references. While they’re shooting the film, an actual vampire appears in the town. The Marx reading group and a famous factory owner also joins the team in this surrealistic journey.

Luis Buñuel should be the first person who may come to mind during this film experience. The absurdity of the events and the extremely laid-back reactions from people helps the film not take itself seriously and build a coherent world. It heavily relies on the comedy elements, which were a lot and funny, but I’m not sure if they were enough to carry the whole film. I lost interest a couple of times during the second half.

The scene where they eat watermelon together at a picnic included in the movie poster introduced me to an interesting alternative way to share a watermelon with friends. Other things that I want to remember:

The scene where the butler was questioning the surplus value discussion and arguing that he’s not producing anything that might have a surplus value
When the reading group was asked what’s their theme, they were underlining the ‘critical’ part of the ‘Critical Marx Reading Group’
The love of cinema and the text/reading inside the film
The night when Octavia is annoyed since Ljowushka comes home late. She smokes a joint sitting on the stairs. When he enters, she returns to her room and tells him to finish the joint.
The dreamlike scenes with the street sign ‘Friedrichstraße’? (Not sure, that’s what I saw)

Trivia

“Although the movie premiered in March 2021 at the Berlin International Film Festival, in the german speaking countries Germany, Switzerland and Austria the movie was geo-blocked. Therefore there was the exceptional case that it ran on a german film festival, but neither the german press nor the german audience were able to see it at the time.” – from IMDB
I read in one interview that the director got into Marx during the university years and he was joining to some Marx reading groups. I like it when someone transforms this personal and collective minor experience to a cultural product. I think there are a lot of interesting things happening in the university campuses that can be translated and included in other narrative forms.
From Ali Karimnia’s review on Letterboxd: “Although traces of many filmmakers can be seen in Julian Radlmaier’s latest film: from Roy Anderson to Wes Andersson, from Godard to Jarmusch, etc., we are still on the side of a artwork that can well be called a filmmaker.” It’s a bit too much reference, even for me.

Ref

Marx, K. (1990). Capital Vol. 1 (B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published in 1867)

Corsage (2022)

I watched Corsage in Kino International without English subtitles. I was wandering around on a boring Sunday trying to find a film to watch, and didn’t notice that it didn’t have subtitles, DF. Kino International might be the cinema that I wanted to visit, but something was withholding me for a long time. Maybe because it looks so classic and I was feeling that I might not be able to follow some manners. But this film was a good fit for the special visit. The average age of the audience was a bit more than 60. Not sure if it was just a coincidence or if the film was a period drama that didn’t attract the youth. Or, maybe the film audience is aging anyways, the senescent seventh art… Conversely, the feminist and queer perspective of the film was really fresh and contemporary. It was unlike the period dramas I had watched before.

Watching films in a language I don’t understand always reminds me of the short interview with Jim Jarmusch in a car where he talks about how he likes watching films in languages that he doesn’t understand. I haven’t seen many, but the last one I remember was Dolan’s Matthias et Maxime (2019). I had hoped it would include enough English dialogues to understand, aber nie, almost no English at all. Still, I could track the emotions and the plot roughly. The same happened with Corsage, but I still enjoyed it. Plus, Sisi was speaking maybe four or five languages fluently in the film. Which I also don’t understand most of the time.

Wikipedia time. Duchess Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie in Bavaria, also called Sisi/Sissi was first the Duchess of Bavaria, then the Empress of Austria, and even Queen of Hungary for some time. She’s famous for many things: her looks and physical regimen, the Mayerling incident, and her assassination. There are also a lot of plays, films, and tv series dedicated to her: Sternberg, Cocteau, and Visconti are the first names who worked around her story. The most popular films are probably the ones from the 50s, starring Romy Schneider. The IMDB trivia mentions that there were five Austrian/German productions about her life only during the year 2021. Not following a committed biopic storyline, Corsage focuses on only one year of her life in 1877. The camera intentionally excludes many aspects of the public and formal life and instead focuses on private life.

The best thing about the film was the acting and the depth of the character, Sisi. The film opens with a suspenseful scene where Sisi holds her breath in a bathtub for quite a long time. I read some critics reading it as a metaphor for the film. It’s a character study about the struggles around psychology on the one hand, but it’s more about the societal structure that squeezes the character, even if she’s a Duchess. Melancholy. Thinking of it together with the film title, corsage, the film’s perspective towards the character is pretty clear. Sisi had many touching moments in the film, such as waking her daughter in the middle of the night to go for a horse ride, lying down on the bed of an injured soldier while visiting the army in the emergency room and sharing cigarettes with him, the final dance scene where her beard grows out of nowhere or the drug scenes in general.

While saying the ‘best thing,’ I forgot the other best thing: hearing Camille. Incidentally, it’ll be the second Dolan-related reference in the short text, but after encountering Camille with Paris and Tout dit and loving her songs, I fell in love with her opening song, Home Is Where It Hurts, in Dolan’s Juste la fin du monde (2016). It’s still one of my favorites. In Corsage, another song of her is used, “She was“. I thought the way the song is employed in the film was similar to Juste la fin du monde. Very high and ecstasizing the audience in just the correct scene. 💚 for Camille.

Vicky Krieps talks about her preparations for the film in an interview (from Cannes?), mentioning the training for horse riding, fencing, learning enough Hungarian, and ice swimming. While watching the film, I was impressed by the range of sports activities that Sisi was doing. She also elucidates how the idea of the film arose with her mentioning the idea to make a film about Elisabeth to Marie Kreutzer. I’ll try to redact the second part of the interview where she mentions how the film was born out of her childhood:

The idea comes from me. Because I saw these Romy Schneider movies when I was a little girl. And because in my household it was all about Janis Joplin and I was not allowed to watch princess movies… It was very exciting when I could go to my neighbor and watch princess movies, which was Sisi. So I loved them as a little girl. And when I was 14, I read the biography. And reading the biography, I thought, 14, I was too naive to really understand but it was enough to leave me with this enigma and like the puzzled about why was the woman like this? Why was she building the first fitness machines? Why was she not taking pictures? What was the problem? Or was she crazy, or you know… So when I worked in Vienna with Marie Kreutzer, seven years back, I said ‘Why is no one making a movie about Sisi, you know like a real one’? Because, 14, I had a feeling … some kind of mystery around the image we all have… And she laughed at me, she was like ‘hahaha, no, no one will do that, it’s kitch it’s not interesting’. And I said ‘really? Because, you know, when I read, young girl, I thought it was, it was’. And then nothing. And then, three years later … That’s really woman power. Without a word, without a bla bla… I get a finished script in my postbox, with a postcard saying: ‘Well I did go to the archive then, and you were right.’

Die innere Sicherheit (2000)

What can I say, she’s walking away
From what we’ve seen
What can I do, still loving you
It’s all a dream
How can we hang on to a dream
How can it, will it be, the way it seems
— How Can We Hang on to a Dream, Tim Hardin (OST)

This is the earliest film I’ve seen from Petzold, made in 2000. It’s also the first of his ‘Ghosts’ Trilogy together with Gespenster (2005) and Yella (2007). Letterboxd shows eight more films from the director before this; some are short films. While the direct translation of ‘Die Innere Sicherheit’ is something like ‘Internal Security’, the English title of the film is ‘The State I am In’. At first, I thought the political connotation is lost in translation but then noticed ‘the state’. I remember trying to mention the film during a German class to the teacher the day after I watched it. Just instantly, she ridiculed me for the title I tried to pronounce. I thought the name evoked an example of the cheap crime fiction movies in the teacher’s mind. Maybe it was something different; I don’t know; I couldn’t say anything other than the film’s name in German, and I still can’t. Anyway, the IMDb has 2.6k votes for the film now, so I don’t expect to include the film in a daily conversation anymore.

It’s a ‘crime’ fiction where the crime is long gone. Jeanne and her parents run away from the police and the state due to their probably illegal leftist/terrorist background. In the plot, RAF is explicitly mentioned, but it’s not explicitly stated in the film. Probably, it’s an easy guess for the people who know the background.). The film opens with the family hiding in Portugal, and then they return to Germany hoping to fly somewhere they can feel safe again. They try to find money from ex-comrades or a hidden trove. When those don’t pay off, they try to rob a bank.

Around this story of running away, the film focuses on Jeanne. The adolescent daughter of the family becomes a fugitive at an early age. She’s out of the regular school education, learning a new language, and doing some translations, probably because she might need them soon. Her family buys or steals pretty oldskool and childish clothes -a loose yellow sweater with a bee on it- to her which makes her embarrassed. But she still has a solid love and trust in her parents. She’s in, with them. As a youngster en route, she has encounters with others, ones that compel her. She meets with a broke surfer guy who loves Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and falls in love with him. She stumbles a girl, the daughter of one of his parents, who listens to cool music and wears a blue t-shirt having ‘Diego Maradona’ on it. A couple of scenes later, Jeanne steals a blue t-shirt. Frances Meh captures Petzold’s interest in Jeanne, her family, and other characters in his films in a short comment on the film: “… you know it’s a Petzold joint. He just can’t turn his eye away from people in liminal states.”

Taking the family’s political history and the transformation of their ex-comrades as a backdrop, the film primarily focuses on Jeanne’s hardships while growing up in this constant fear and disguise. She acts way older than her actual age due to the circumstances which do not let her live like her peers. Sharing cigarettes and starting a conversation looks like to only way for her to socialize with strangers. She does the shopping, takes her role if there’s a secret plan, or even finds shelter for the family when necessary. At times, she says that she’s sick of everything. Falling in love also lets her guard down.

The film has some silent but striking scenes like Jeanne sitting at the table next to her mother with the money they stole; or the painful melodramatic breakup with the surfer guy -sorry I forgot his name- that was similar to Turkish melodramas – “I never loved you, you’re a pathetic and disgusting person”. Not to spoil it, I would avoid the intense final scene. But there was an even more interesting scene that stuck in my mind. While the family was running away on the empty highway, they stop for a moment at the traffic lights, and they start to suspect the movements of others. One guy gets out of the car to take a look around, there seem to be some other cars following the family. Jeanne’s father thinks they’re busted, gets out, and surrenders. Suddenly, when the lights turn light, everyone minds their own business. They hadn’t even noticed the runaway family. Maybe connected to Petzold’s interest in ‘ghosts’, this scene underlines the anxiety of running away together with being a ghost or nobody.

“This fraught drama about an ex-Red Army Faction-style couple, still on the run with their teenage daughter, doesn’t use a single flashback to narrate their past. The tension apparent in every frame speaks of the unseen state forces whose ‘domestic security’ was—and remains—their mortal opponent.” (Hertäg, 2022)

I wanted to take this long quote from Max Nelson in Film Comment which documents the opening scene because I also listened to one of Petzold’s interviews where he argues that in the first two minutes, the film’s morality shows itself:

“The first two minutes of The State I Am In go a long way towards explaining Petzold’s methods and intentions in the trilogy. A young girl with blonde, wind-tossed hair—eyes downcast, lips set in a natural frown—gets change at a seaside bar, strolls over to the jukebox, and puts on an American pop song (“How Can We Hang On to a Dream?” by Tim Hardin). The camera hovers on her shoulder, lingering over the curve of her neck, then pulls back slightly to follow her as she saunters with studied casualness towards an empty table. (“What can I say,” the singer asks plaintively: “she’s walking away…”) She glances off-camera, casts her eyes back down, lights a cigarette, and sits silently for another twenty seconds, lost in thought. Her eyes barely move; her mind is busy turning over invisible possibilities, considering options, and reflecting on a past to which we don’t yet have access. When she looks back up, Petzold cuts to a shot from her eyeline of a handful of surfers chatting at the other end of the dock, and her desire finally connects, in our mind, with an object. But it’s in those previous twenty seconds, I would argue, that she comes alive to us. For a moment, her desire seems to exist outside of, or prior to, the narrative that is about to be constructed around it. It would be hard to count the number of times over the course of the trilogy that Petzold films a young woman sitting alone like this, planning what kind of movie she wants to inhabit.”

Hertäg, J. (2022, May/June). Germany’s Counter-Cinemas. New Left Review, 135. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii135/articles/julia-hertag-germany-s-counter-cinemas

L’événement [Happening] (2021)

I haven’t read Annie Ernaux yet. I read that Les Années (2008) and Passion simple (1991) gained passionate readers in Turkey quickly after the translations. On a mundane Sunday morning, I was browsing through the films at Yorck, I saw this film adaptation was screening at noon, in a single séance, at Rollberg. The name Ernaux and the Best Film Award at Venice Film Festival excited me. With that, I also learned that Venice FF is the first film festival, started in 1932, as a part of the 18th Venice Biennale.

Audrey Diwan’s film tells the story of Anne Duchesne who studies literature in France, in the early 1960s. She’s a hardworking and promising student where all the students are highly stressed about passing the exams and not being able to explore their desires. The only relaxation moment they have is going to university parties, drinking coke, and dancing a bit. Living in a dormitory, Anne occasionally visits her parents who run a bar. The family conversations are also focused primarily on her success at school and earning her life.

Anne gets pregnant. Her carnal and arduous journey for finding a way to get abortion starts. Together with the fear and espousement of the law, no one helps her: her friends, her boyfriend, or the doctors. Anti-abortionist doctors even trick her with lies. Since it’s also unthinkable to tell her family too, she tries to find a way all by herself. The two films that this struggle quickly reminded me of are 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile (2007) and Araf (2012), from Romania and Turkey. Lately, I have also encountered a lot of interference from the US regarding the oppression of anti-abortion laws, and the interrogations about miscarriages. The film feels like a story about the past for a second, then all of a sudden it becomes too actual.

I listed some quotes from the various reviews below. Things like the ‘buy yourself a novel’ scene, are really helpful reminders.

cinechat

Shot exclusively in a 1.37 ratio

The film and its director refuse to censor: “The other grand subject of the film – one that is very important for me – is carnal pleasure.” said Diwan.

Happening revolves around the dichotomy of women’s pleasure and women’s pain.

Anne’s first attempt at self-inflicted abortion recalls Karin’s self-mutilation in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972)

it is the first and only time blood is shown in the film. Indeed, the absence of blood throughout Happening is interesting to note and suits the film’s deterrence from exaggerated melodrama.

We are never allowed to forget this because the film is divided into the weeks leading up to her exams.

We are given through Anne’s story an empathetic understanding of how people solve “life’s problems” – we go about solving them by saying, as Anne says, “I solve them as best I can”.

The Hollywood Reporter

a slice of clear-eyed French social realism that will be meaningful to anyone who cares about personal freedoms.

Annie sees another doctor (François Loriquet), who tricks her by prescribing a drug he says will induce her period but instead strengthens the embryo.

Shooting in the boxy Academy ratio, cinematographer Laurent Tangy sticks close to the protagonist throughout, searching for signs of surrender in her face even as her resolve never falters.

The film serves as both a transfixing drama and an urgent reminder of the need to protect women’s reproductive rights.

The Guardian

Winner at the Venice film festival, Audrey Diwan’s film captures the panic of an unwanted pregnancy before the legalisation of abortion in provincial France

Her hardworking mum and dad, Gabrielle and Jacques (played by Sandrine Bonnaire and Eric Verdin) run a bar, and Gabrielle is endlessly proud of her daughter, at one stage giving her some money and saying: “Buy yourself a novel!”

Diwan’s movie is cleverly structured so that we do not at first know who the father is… . The drama mimics Anne’s own sense of denial, her own refusal to remember or imagine the catastrophe.

Happening takes a different line on abortion than a film like, say, Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake from 2004 or Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days from 2007, films that focused with a more ironised chill on the abortionist; this is about the pregnant woman herself.

Deadline

Trying to vomit in secret, to shower in communal bathrooms without anyone noticing the mounding belly, stealing food from other girls’ lunchboxes and looking – constantly looking – for someone to tell, someone who would tell someone else who might know something, without being branded a slut.

Some recent books on cinema (II)

Previously on some recent books on cinema (I)

Dell’Aria, A. (2021). The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment, Palgrave & Macmillan.

Existing outside the boundaries of mainstream cinema, the field of experimental film and artists’ moving image presents a radical challenge not only to the conventions of that cinema but also to the social and cultural norms it represents. In offering alternative ways of seeing and experiencing the world, it brings to the fore different visions and dissenting voices. In recent years, scholarship in this area has moved from a marginal to a more central position as it comes to bear upon critical topics such as medium-specificity, ontology, the future of cinema, changes in cinematic exhibition and the complex interrelationships between moving image technology, aesthetics, discourses, and institutions. This book series stakes out exciting new directions for the study of alternative film practice–from the black box to the white cube, from film to digital, crossing continents and disciplines, and developing fresh theoretical insights and revised histories. Although employing the terms ‘experimental film’ and ‘artists’ moving image’, we see these as interconnected practices and seek to interrogate the crossovers and spaces between different kinds of oppositional filmmaking.

Introduction
Enchantment: Encountering Moving Images on Urban Surfaces
Commercial Breaks: Intra-spectacular Public Art
Screen Spaces: Zones of Interaction and Recognition
The Light Festival Phenomenon
Precarious Platforms: The Paradox of Permanent Moving Images
Superimposition: Forms of Moving Image Site-Specificity
Postscript: Reflections from a Summer Without Public Space

Combe, K. (2021), Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film: Rant Against the Regime, Routledge.

Since 1980, when neoliberal and neoconservative forces began their hostile takeover of western culture, a new type of political satire has emerged that works to unmask and deter those toxic doctrines. Literary and cultural critic Kirk Combe calls this new form of satire the Rant. The Rant is grim, highly imaginative, and complex in its blending of genres. It mixes facets of satire, science fiction, and monster tale to produce widely consumed spectacles—major studio movies, popular television/streaming series, bestselling novels—designed to disturb and to provoke. The Rant targets what Combe calls the Regime. Simply put, the Regime is the sum of the dangerous social, economic, and political orthodoxies spurred on by neoliberal and neoconservative polity. Such practices include free-market capitalism, corporatism, militarism, religiosity, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and so on. In the Rant, then, we have a unique and wholly contemporary genre of political expression and protest: speculative satire.

The Briefest of Introductions: What, Why, How
The Rant
The Regime
Ranting Against the Regime
Living Under a Lousy Orthodoxy
Special Topic Rants
Neoliberal A.I.
The Briefest of Conclusions: So What? Why Bother?
How Does This Matter?

Klecker, C. & Grabher, Gudrun M. (ed.), 2022, The Disfigured Face in American Literature, Film, and Television, Routledge.

The face, being prominent and visible, is the foremost marker of a person’s identity as well as their major tool of communication. Facial disfigurements, congenital or acquired, not only erase these significant capacities, but since ancient times, they have been conjured up as outrageous and terrifying, often connoting evil or criminality in their associations – a dark secret being suggested “behind the mask,” the disfigurement indicating punishment for sin. Complemented by an original poem by Kenneth Sherman and a plastic surgeon’s perspective on facial disfigurement, this book investigates the exploitation of these and further stereotypical tropes by literary authors, filmmakers, and showrunners, considering also the ways in which film, television, and the publishing industry have more recently tried to overcome negative codifications of facial disfigurement, in the search for an authentic self behind the veil of facial disfigurement. An exploration of fictional representations of the disfigured face, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, American studies and literary studies with interests in representations of disfigurement and the Other.

Ugliness as deformity in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and Flavor of the Month
Drawing a broader picture of facial disfigurement: Moving beyond “narrative prosthesis” in James Hankins’ Drawn
Writing against the stigma: Facial disfigurement in R. J. Palacio’s Wonder
Song of my self or “I become the wounded person”: Kenneth Sherman’s poetic tribute to Elephant Man
Loving the monster: The Elephant Man as modern fable
Facial disfigurement on screen: James Bond and the politics of portraying the post-9/11 terrorist
Masculinity and facial disfigurement in contemporary US television characters
Fictional ‘dissections’ of a medical curiosity? Facial disfigurement in Grey’s Anatomy

Law, H. L. (2021), Ambiguity and Film Criticism: Reasonable Doubt, Palgrave Macmillan.

This book defends an account of ambiguity which illuminates the aesthetic possibilities of film and the nature of film criticism. Ambiguity typically describes the condition of multiple meanings. But we can find multiple meanings in what appears unambiguous to us. So, what makes ambiguity ambiguous? This study argues that a sense of uncertainty is vital to the concept. Ambiguity is what presses us to inquire into our puzzlement over a movie, to persistently ask “why is it as it is?” Notably, this account of the concept is also an account of its criticism. It recognises that a satisfying assessment of what is ambiguous involves both our reason and doubt; that is, reason and doubt can work together in our practice of reading. This book, then, considers ambiguity as a form of reasonable doubt, one that invites us to reflect on our critical efforts, rethinking the operation of film criticism.

Introduction: Why Is It as It Is?
Difficulty of Reading
Perplexity of Style
Depth of Suggestion
Uncertainty of Viewpoint
Threat of Insignificance
Concluding Remarks: Reasonable Doubt

Jayamanne, L. (2021), Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz, Amsterdam University Press.

Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz explores the poetic thinking of these master filmmakers. It examines theoretical ideas, including Maori anthropology of the gift and Sufi philosophy of the image, to conceive film as abundant gift. Elaborating on how this gift may be received, this book imagines film as our indispensable mentor – a wild mentor who teaches us how to think with moving images by learning to perceive evanescent forms that simply appear and disappear.

Foreword: In Memory of Thomas Elsaesser
Introduction: Spirit of the Gift: Cinematic Reciprocity
A Gift Economy: G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929)
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Parajanov
Nicole Kidman in Blue Light: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Ornamentation and Pathology: Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt (2006)
Afterword: Poetics of Film Pedagogy