VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in March 2013. The other side of the window There is one type of image that is central in the cinema of João Pedro Rodrigues, and that appears in the first fifteen minutes of O Fantasma (2000), Two Drifters (2005), and To Die Like a Man (2009): […]
Republished
Sieranevada (2016), Cristi Puiu / The Ornithologist (2016), João Pedro Rodrigues
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in October 2016. The symbolic is dead, long live the symbolic 1. Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada starts with an awkwardly composed shot of an SUV carelessly parked in the middle of the street. Lary (Mimi Brănescu) gets off and goes inside a building, leaving his idling vehicle for […]
Walker (2012), Tsai Ming-liang
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in December 2013. The politics of the sacred A man on a flight of stairs, with his head shaved bare and the red garments of a monk. It is the first shot of Walker, a 25-minute short film directed by Tsai Ming-liang. At first, the man appears […]
Le Quattro Volte (2010), Michelangelo Frammartino
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in April 2013. Meta-existence Le Quattro Volte, by Michelangelo Frammartino, starts out like a typical observational film. After a few seemingly gratuitous shots of an artisanal charcoal clamp, we start following the steps of a nameless elder (Giuseppe Fuda) who works as a goat herder in a […]
Neon Bull (Boi Neon, 2015), Gabriel Mascaro
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in September 2016. Bull and glow There are many ways one can enter the world of Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull, but one that I find particularly fruitful hides behind a discreet casting choice: Vinícius Oliveira as Junior, a character who appears in the second half of the […]
No Home Movie (2015), Chantal Akerman
* Originally published at Cinética in September 2015. A branch in the wind “ ‘What am I doing here?’ There was no answer. The landscape did not answer.” Jonas Mekas in Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) No Home Movie – Chantal Akerman’s latest documentary focused on her relationship with her now-departed mother, Natalia Akerman – is a […]
Museum Hours (2012), Jem Cohen
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in November 2016. The politics of attention At an interview included in the book Dissenting Words, the philosopher Jacques Rancière tells a story of working-class emancipation published at a militant newspaper during the French Revolution: “He is in a bourgeois home, laying the wood floors; he is […]
Naked Childhood (L’Enfance Nue, 1968), Maurice Pialat
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Orginally published at Cinética in March 2014. Redefining impressions “Film people, film the world as if cinema was just getting born. Be suspicious of the cinema-institution, the machine that reproduces appearances. Reject technical découpage and all of cinema’s know-how; act as if there was no ‘film language’ already in place. Rediscover the […]
Batguano (2014), Tavinho Teixeira
Tavinho Teixeira, the director of Sol Alegria, which was screened as part of Veredas – A Generation of Brazilian Filmmakers at Lincoln Center in December, has put his previous feature, the delightful Batguano (2014), for free streaming on Vimeo, with English subtitles. I’ve come to appreciate the film even more since I first saw it, in 2014, and […]
The Moving Creatures (O Que se Move, 2013), Caetano Gotardo
VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS * Originally published at Cinética in May, 2013. Half-open window The Moving Creatures, Caetano Gotardo’s debut feature film, begins with Pedro (Wandré Gouveia) seated in bed, with his back turned to a half-open window – open enough to allow a poisonous breeze to come in and spread across the whole film. We’ll […]