The above review strikes me as particularly unhelpful for people who are actually interested in avant-garde, and poetic cinema. Yes it is slow, if you were expecting an action movie, and yes it is a silent film, but there are very few silent films which explore the poetry of the banal, the sublime everydayness of existenz. To me, it is one of the most beautiful and subtle films of all time, and is one of the first genuine "poem" films (along with H20 by Ralph Steiner, Manhatta by Paul Strand, Berlin: City of a Symphony by Walter Ruttman, and $24 Island by Robert Flaherty among others).
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (in his book on cinema, The Movement-Image) gives a wonderful reading of this film in which he argues that the film is no longer a representation of rain, but is attempting to give the viewer the feeling, or pure "quality" of rain, called a "qualisign". The editing is not unlike Robert Bresson in the fragmentation and use of what Deleuze calls the "any-space-whatever". In Rain the shots do not have a signed linear sequence, and have no forward movement in time (there is no character moving through the spaces, nothing to make one shot "before" or "after" another one in time). This means that all of the shots could have happened all at the exact same time, theoretically. This is one of the qualities of an any-space-whatever, a space in which the spatial and temporal potentials are de-connected (unlike a fiction or documentary film which has cohesive spatial and temporal dimensions).
Amazing movie which has gone on to influence many great poem-film-makers like Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Joanna Margaret Paul, Nathaniel Dorsky, Alexander Greenhough, myself and many others.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (in his book on cinema, The Movement-Image) gives a wonderful reading of this film in which he argues that the film is no longer a representation of rain, but is attempting to give the viewer the feeling, or pure "quality" of rain, called a "qualisign". The editing is not unlike Robert Bresson in the fragmentation and use of what Deleuze calls the "any-space-whatever". In Rain the shots do not have a signed linear sequence, and have no forward movement in time (there is no character moving through the spaces, nothing to make one shot "before" or "after" another one in time). This means that all of the shots could have happened all at the exact same time, theoretically. This is one of the qualities of an any-space-whatever, a space in which the spatial and temporal potentials are de-connected (unlike a fiction or documentary film which has cohesive spatial and temporal dimensions).
Amazing movie which has gone on to influence many great poem-film-makers like Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Joanna Margaret Paul, Nathaniel Dorsky, Alexander Greenhough, myself and many others.
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