Ordet

Dishevelled madness emphatically accompanies a scholarly son who embraced study, and took grand imposing theological works to distressed soul and body and mind.

Even amongst an upright people from a severe age religiously endowed, this devout son seems neigh unreachable according to quotidian scripture. 

Upon the farm, one of his brothers is raising a family without faith, his wife dutifully reproaching him yet still conjugally resigned.

His other sibling wholeheartedly seeks the adoring hand of a tailor's daughter, who believes in different spiritual traditions his father scorns with vehement sacrilege. 

Yet united through familial bonds they nurture strength and disciplined fortitude, resolutely caring for one another with kind pastoral bucolic eagerness.

The little children believe their uncle who predicts the future and heralds spirits, with the sincere trusting uncorrupted eye of wondrous observant faithful innocents.

Complications shatter the harmonious simplicity when routine child birth welcomes constraint, and bewildering death despotically envisages humbling loneliness and stoic resolve.

The insane blunt stark reincarnation proclaiming sheer and utter disillusion.

Before objective patience and despondent synergies boldly reawaken slumbering ecstasy. 

Strange to see grim volatile criticisms awkwardly dividing a farming village, acquiesced demographic consistency effectively determining biblical denomination. 

So many divergent alternative faiths vicissitudinously claiming divinity, with fisticuffs and arguments and drills literately fusing spiritual discord.

Ordet's style of film is something I'm not used to a direct illustration of imaginative belief, wherein which archaic lecture and austere fervency generously coalesce with narrative affection.

Was there once a time when religious tales showcasing family life and exotic miracles, widely dominated domestic markets inquisitively inhabited by the faithful?

Was faith so strong that supernatural and otherworldly films created revenue, and were in a studio's best interest to modestly disseminate with robust vigour?

Like the western it likely faded with the secular passage of peaceful times, in the constructive wake of blinding wars which reduced humanity to so much rubble.

Discursive realities monumental trends enthusiastically enriching coffers.

Novelty to trend to anachronism.

Back to school.

Chapter and verse. 

Museum Hours

The active mind having aged to reimagine engagement through interpretive fluid rapt multivariable impression.

A rambunctious youth clad in melodic calculi (managing and touring with bands), then ruminative middle-age embracing quiet illustration (monitoring different rooms in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Art Museum).

Living a thoughtful solitary life well-attuned to simple pleasures (Bobby Sommer as Johann), he meets a curious tourist one day visiting from Montréal (Mary Margaret O'Hara as Anne).

She's in town to watch over her cousin who's fallen into a coma, and would love to see the sights but doesn't know where to begin.

The film loosely follows their interactions as they travel in and about town, different features brought to life through historical exposition. It's not just the Kunsthistorisches that shines, Vienna's contemporary spirit enlivens as well, evocatively situated in past and present, replete with urban wildlife.

As Anne and Johann converse reflections on art evanescently materialize, not as if they're searching for essentials, more like chill jazzy random observation.

In fact it's like Museum Hours aesthetically cherishes the chill and random, as various images are freely showcased without a particular focus.

It's not presenting a specific thesis arguing for a point of view, but rather sharing different images to let Vienna thrive on through.

According to individual tastes, a clever seminar in artistic analysis attempts to lead visitors away from cocktail clichés, to more expansive literary compositions, as they observe different paintings, like there isn't an essence to be extracted but rather a variety of compelling interpretive exports.

Johann looks on in studious wonder as a guide imaginatively elucidates, her insights applicable to Jem Cohen's style which doesn't seek to blandly distill.

He observes that the right has made things much more serious, and made casual conversation much less prevalent, if the left loses sight of lighthearted argument, don't you wind up with The Lobster?

If the emphasis is on the correct interpretation of a shifting multivariable phenomenon, aren't such aggressive and violent evaluations highly dubious and irrational?

Taking absurd comedic outputs that clearly lack exhaustive scope, and treating them with biblical import, can lead to an unwillingness for people to participate in sustained and vigorous debate.

If they aren't treated with biblical import but rather as just another form of expression, then you have something much less frightening, and more amenable to inclusive discourse.

La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in Fur)

Ceremoniously shifting from breaking wave to breaking wave, cast adrift to buoyantly submerge, the surf submissively dominating, an exacting cyclical shock, one young playwright, fascinated by insubordination, jostling the erotically profane, is interrupted, is, slowly, commodified, undeniably secure in his misplacements, subdued emphatic gusts, assured of their tidal pertinence, to enact the derailment of triumph.

On its own terms.

Ambiguity/ambivalence beguilingly solemnizes the dialectic, the exchange, a protracted piecemeal purge, sensuously persuasive, overpoweringly contained.

As the page turns.

A reading.

Precision.

Opportunity.

Mesmerizing mythical lambasted seduction generously vouchsafes its domineering obsequiousness, in Roman Polanski's crippling La Vénus à la fourrure (Venus in Furs), existentialism be damned, fiesta.

My favourite filmic adaptation of a play with a small cast and minimal setting is Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey into Night, but La Vénus à la fourrure now firmly occupies second place in my thoughts, due to Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric's powerful performances.

Opulently humble.

The ending was a surprise since it makes a definitive suggestion, although ambiguity remains, only a vestige however.

I would have faded with him tied to the cactus.

There must have been passionate arguments here.

Perhaps the definitive suggestion makes for a stronger ending.

I admit to being a sucker for critical controversy.

Not that there isn't plenty of critical controversy in the film.

You could argue that it's about the aesthetics of critical controversies themselves.

The whole night through.

Jodorowsky's Dune

A filmmaker possessing the highest possible artistic intentions, for whom film is a sub/conscious pyrotechnic visceral emulsion, wildly jettisoning extracted reified ideological peaks, capable of concretely delineating multilaterally deconstructive minutia, their testaments clasping your hands and mine, distinct explosive intraoperative trysts, persuasive incipient confounding strips, Alejandro Jodorowsky almost made Dune, and his crushing curtailment still resonates to this day.

The cast and crew he assembled would have possibly been the coolest ever.

That voice which obsesses about disabling degrees of practicality was non-existent, pure unabashed committed expansive insurgence, unconcerned with what actually takes place in the novel which he hadn't even read before embracing it as his next project, motivated by perceived interpretive fortuitous pacts, the universe having opened-up and provided him with chance integral reprieved constituents, like an intergalactic curvaceous onslaught, or the ultimate Proustian daydream.

The Blueberry.

Not that his dreams weren't practical, if anything, they represented the apotheosis of practicality, a spiritual conception of teamwork seeking superlative aesthetic collegial partnerships who were to be given hands-off inspirational direction, united in their pursuit of memorializing a trance, abstraction, attraction, refraction.

Jodorowsky's son Brontis trained intensively for 2 years with a martial arts master to prepare to play Paul Atreides.

Salvadore Dalí may have made 100,000 a minute to play Shaddam Corrino IV.

Orson Welles could have gorged himself ad infinitum.

I don't want to say too much about the film, it's better if you see Jodorowsky and companions explain it themselves, the Dan O'Bannon recording fitting perfectly.

Possibly the most influential film never made, transisting semantic transcendence.

Jodorowsky envisioned a groundbreaking universal consciousness expanding waking delirium.

Too much for one film alone, its manifold parts have arguably become greater than those initially conceived.

Still like aspects of David Lynch's version.

Interpretation

We sidelined the
story to step
into the sequence
smoothly.