Nice to have to films recently that really connected with me.
This one seems to have found a bypass straight to my subconscious in parts. Perhaps due to the flickering quality, of the retro silent shooting? The black and white hip and hypnagogic approach. I really did find myself on that threshold of awareness and dream.
At the outset, I thought Maddin was making a film through found footage, so good was the choppiness of the scenes and the sea. It must have been amazing to see this with a live narrator and better yet a team of foley fiends. But seeing it alone, that also helped with the films resonance.
The story as such is a strange slurry, as others have denoted. Twisted personal archetypes (the male protagonist sharing the filmmaker's name and likely a largesse of his angst). After seeing this, I'm hard-pressed on how to put it all together. It's like a 3D puzzle that I now find flattened in my hands.
And I'm not film student, just a fan, but I suspect this is rife with opportunity for many a thesis. Nosferatu shadows. Lighthouse introspection. Sexual innuendo and overdoses. Owning the video is certainly an option, with its multiple narrated versions (including Crispin Glover and Laurie Anderson), and its surfeit of cinematic sensation. The soundtrack as jagged as the isolated island's coastline, competes well with the aforementioned foley fun.
Fans of outre film, like the Ann Arbor Film Fest can look inward in many ways with this.
I find myself drifting closer to the Maddin crowd.
9/10
This one seems to have found a bypass straight to my subconscious in parts. Perhaps due to the flickering quality, of the retro silent shooting? The black and white hip and hypnagogic approach. I really did find myself on that threshold of awareness and dream.
At the outset, I thought Maddin was making a film through found footage, so good was the choppiness of the scenes and the sea. It must have been amazing to see this with a live narrator and better yet a team of foley fiends. But seeing it alone, that also helped with the films resonance.
The story as such is a strange slurry, as others have denoted. Twisted personal archetypes (the male protagonist sharing the filmmaker's name and likely a largesse of his angst). After seeing this, I'm hard-pressed on how to put it all together. It's like a 3D puzzle that I now find flattened in my hands.
And I'm not film student, just a fan, but I suspect this is rife with opportunity for many a thesis. Nosferatu shadows. Lighthouse introspection. Sexual innuendo and overdoses. Owning the video is certainly an option, with its multiple narrated versions (including Crispin Glover and Laurie Anderson), and its surfeit of cinematic sensation. The soundtrack as jagged as the isolated island's coastline, competes well with the aforementioned foley fun.
Fans of outre film, like the Ann Arbor Film Fest can look inward in many ways with this.
I find myself drifting closer to the Maddin crowd.
9/10