In a succession of shots inside a silk factory showing the long piston-like production lines and the bits and pieces of a mechanical world, the parameters of O-Tsune’s own world become apparent: it is that of an endless toiling so that her son, the young and prepubescent Ryosuke, can finish up his elementary education and they can both live unperturbed in their scrimping and meager existence in the small, homey, rural town of Shinsü. But one evening, while working in the house, O-Tsune hears from her son that he has been asked at school whether he plans to continue with his education, going to high school and from there even…
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As a man of surrealist extraction working on it with another notable surrealist of the time, Luis Buñuel—who was to go on to complete his fantastic corpus starting with that one pristine surrealist sally, Un Chien Andalou—Jean Epstein directed and produced The Fall of the House of Usher with the result that, bringing alive the eerie gothic ambience of Poe’s short story, he committed to film a visual tour de force: a funhouse of style and atmosphere. The film is chilling, for its time visually ingenious, and a pleasure to look at, despite the want of other compelling cinematic elements and the graininess of the film (owing perhaps to the…
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With sumptuous colors and a settled, contemplative aesthetic of long shots and static shots interspersed with some notable close-ups, Raise the Red Lantern has the flair and attentiveness of a great film. But it’s not as successful as if it were evaluated by its visual pleasures alone—missing is the subtle development of character and a resolution that makes sense of the closed-world oppression of this Chinese estate, where the main character, Songlian, has to live and die as a concubine of a shadowy but omnipresent patriarchal figure. The ending confirms for me that the director, Yimou Zhang, is unwilling to deal with the implications of a character whose traits of…
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Two men working in a business for violin restoration play squash together and dine together at a local bistro, but they otherwise keep to themselves—at least the voiceover, heard once in the beginning of the story, would have us believe that this is the case. Uttered by the laconic and emotionless Stéphane, this voiceover reveals more than anything else in the story the attitudes and the personality of this vaguely ascetic man. A master craftsman of all things violin, Stéphane works in the shop at the back of their workplace with the stolid patience of a visionary, someone so deeply immersed in his work that the outside world disintegrates as…
