Change Your Image
patrickbois
Reviews
O Pintor e a Cidade (1956)
O Porto According to Art!
A "paragone" was a term popularized by Da Vinci when he compared his own art, painting, to that of those French poets which had anteriorly denigrated his own. In this film Oliveira does something very similar; he asks the viewer to compare art forms, into which his city gracefully fills. Canvas, still photograph, art from moving a camera across a landscape; O Porto is shown here in its splendor. What is hardly surprising is that both Oliveira and the painter both know what is beautiful; they have an eye. When one has laid by whatever beauty for a substantial amount of time, it starts to lose its zing; foreground is blurred. This is why artists like Oliveira and others are needed more and more; to remind us that what is in our cities can be beautiful when taken out of a context replete with stress or noise and put through a camera or canvas. One could almost say that by showing the watercolored city that the painter needs for his art, Oliveira confidently juxtaposes both art forms (and who knows if he felt that his "representation" was superior, or whether it was a question or not, or whether he is helping the painter or showing that there is hardly any difference between art forms). The mixture of all three, however, objectively frame the city as it is and can be; as such, music, moving picture, and painting combine to make a very enjoyable short film.
Nocní hovory s matkou (2001)
An attempt at a forlorn requiem for a mother turns into a narcissistic piece of cinematic refuse!
When an auteur makes a film that is so unbridled of sense and style, that cries of childlike yearning for attention (as is fathomed when an infant cries for its mother's breast), the result might simply stultify the whole. In this case, like an inverse Gestalt analysis, the whole is much less than the sum of its parts. In terms of a forlorn requiem for his mother, some parts adhere together, such as the poetic remnants of his mother's disdain for him, or Karel's recollections of her. Some parts, I'm certain, as exemplified through his "eye" camera, would probably even make his mother dizzy with boredom, and prompt us for the >> button. As such, I still don't know who his mother was, and, additionally, I also realize that a person can be this narcissistic (at the expense of the viewer), as this should have been a personal home video, not a public one. Every artist longs for love, and every artist should not spread his art for just one person, and not everyone. But when it is made for one's self, in this case, it becomes nothing more than something you would see in a first year, third rate creative film classroom.