Ben Nicholson
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Satyricon’
★★★☆☆ If you’ve ever felt any uncertainty about precisely what the term ‘Fellini-esque’ means, then Satyricon (1969) is a definitive, two hour, larger than life, example. Denoting a particular variety of vacuous revelry, the director’s most celebrated works contain fleeting glimpses of it, but this is an audacious feature-length paean to debauchery and excess. Described…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘The Saragossa Manuscript’ review
★★★★☆ There’s a conversation in Wojciech Jerzy Has’ hallucinatory picaresque epic, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), in which a character utters the following words, “if I don’t understand but I can write it down, I approach poetry.” This could well be the filmmaker imparting wisdom through the mouth of his character, or perhaps comfort to the…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘The Hourglass Sanatorium’ review
★★★★★ Wojciech Jerzy Has took great relish in toying with narrative convention in the nestled labyrinthine pages of The Saragossa Manuscript (1965). He dispenses with it entirely in The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973), an oneiric odyssey through the cob-webbed recesses of memory and into the great beyond. Jan Nowicki plays Josef, who is first introduced on…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Carl Theodor Dreyer Collection’
★★★★☆ Carl Theodor Dreyer may be the titan of Danish of cinema but for a whole host of international cineastes, knowledge of his films doesn’t stretch far beyond the likes of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932) and Ordet (1955). Indeed, in an essay that accompanies the British Film Institute’s fantastic new…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘Knights of the Teutonic Order’ review
★★★★☆ “Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever,” quoth Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero. The turning wheel of time on which the master orator predicated this assertion is one that is palpably intertwined with the viewing experience of Aleksander Ford’s bombastic Knights of the Teutonic Order (1960),…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘Blind Chance’ review
★★★★☆ Traditional narrative tropes of chance and fate are employed to glean some insight into living in Communist era Poland in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (1987). Imagine Sliding Doors (1998) but rather than setting in motion very different romantic entanglements, the failure to catch a train fundamentally turns on a pin someone’s worldview. This is…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘A Short Film About Killing’ review
★★★★★ “Since the days of Cain, no punishment has improved the world or deterred anyone from committing crimes.” A Short Film About Killing (1988) – Krzysztof Kieslowski’s expansion on the fifth chapter of his lauded Dekalog series – sets out its stall. Far more than mere advocacy against the death penalty (although the film played…
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Film Review: ‘The Invisible Life’
★★★☆☆ “It was a low, late afternoon light … that only spoke of distant things.” And so it is that a film seems to perfectly encapsulate itself in the delivery of a single line of dialogue. Those words are spoken by the protagonist of Vítor Gonçalves’ The Invisible Life (2013) in a typical moment of…
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Kinoteka 2015: ‘Eroica’ review
★★★★☆ With the fires of the Second World War still smouldering European cinema rose from the embers across the continent. At one time such resurgence took place through the Polish Film School, a movement intended to make films that would help their country come to terms with the war and all that had happened within…
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DVD Review: ‘Fruit of Paradise’
★★★★★ A lapsarian search for truth sits at the heart of Vera Chytilová’s avant garde masterpiece Fruit of Paradise (1970), but meaning is itself something that must be discovered by its audience. This was the last film that Chytilová made before she endured a seven year ban from filmmaking imposed by the Soviet government ruling…