ido_h Reviews

Humanity (1999)

Not for everyone maybe, but for me.

[29 March 2000]

It is said that Humanite is not for everyone. And i would surely support that claim since I am a steward in the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and had to get up, about every two minutes to open the door to someone sneaker.

Still, I managed to get quite a clear impression of the film which is in my opinion a superb one. Although many people find themselves puzzled by the characters (virtually everyone in the show i attended came out of the cinema looking almost personally insulted by the film) i think that if you know and love Dostoevsky's books you won't find them so hard to understand. Pharaon is simply Prince Mishkin. He is assulted by the bluntness and cruelness of existence and the crime he tries to solve - but is overwhelmed with humility, love and compassion to the world. While his friend make love in a way that seems almost like a rape he makes love to the world, to the clods of the earth. When he rides his bicycle his upper body seems to be moving as if he was making love. But most of all he feels diligent compassion to the world and it's assaulters. The film shows the violence everywhere. Pharaon sees this violence and with his deep gaze manages to disarm it (with protesters and with Domino). I think that Pharaon is a really great acting performance. Pharaon like Mishkin in Dostoevky's notebooks 'sees not in the faces of people but in their hearts.'. The investigation taking place is like an investigation of the inner self. Of the human soul, of humanity. It's a category against Humanity and Pharaon's who is the categor manages to find compassion to humanity. Its sort of like an 'apocalypse now' in rural france.

Drowning by Numbers (1988)

Another great one from Greenway.

[22 March 2000]

'Drowning by numbers', like the other Greenway films, is stuffed with symbols, which meaning is sometimes hard to decipher. Without getting into much detail (unjustifiedly so), I'll summarize the film as a film on the uprise of femininity and the emasculinity and helplessness of the male gender. This film shows women to be more sophisticated, albeit cruel, beings; Women are more competent for the GAME- and indeed, this film, turns the gender table all the way around. I've liked this film very much but, no doubt Greenway masterpiece is really 'the pillow book' which i recommend to anyone.

The Chinese (1967)

One of the greatest movies ever.

[10/10 · 15 March 2000]

Shot a few months before his next masterpiece, La Chinoise is perhaps Godard's best film. The bourgeois Leninist-Communist struggle our commune is doing is both extremely tragic as is a comic one. The film is titled also 'a film in a making' and the film is indeed in a making with all the usual godard tricks such as actors talking to the camera, interviews showing the camera and the production men and so on. But these tricks come not without reason as we witness the group's struggle with what godard was struggling at the time: the fight in two ways. The artistic and the politic one. Godard as well known decided in 1968, a year after this film that 'a political intellectual has only one way to become one: stop being an intellectual' (this is not the precise quoting). This film struggles with some of the most modern and post-modern issues such as the function of language, and the implausibility of the fight against capitalism, and the modern necessity of being a bourgeois and a consumer. the only struggle that is possible is perhaps through art (theater) which is what our heroes do, and what godard is doing. and perhaps he had that notion all through his communistic period. Godard is for me the best Director ever. Each film is like a manifest. each line is poetry. each word is a world.

ido,