WHO\u2019LL STOP THE RAIN?:<\/strong> The second disc of \u201cAvant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and \u201930s\u201d was bizarrely water-themed. It was also vastly less awesome than the first disc! Was this just me and my obsessions, or did the jesses really slacken on this disc? <\/p>\n Anyway, there was one short movie so amazing that it was absolutely, three hundred percent, worth sitting through everything else on the disc. Skip to H2O<\/em> if you want to know about the only awesome flick herein reviewed.<\/p>\n Review of the first disc, part one<\/a>; two<\/a>.<\/p>\n Second disc: La Glace a Trois Faces<\/strong>: French-accented English voiceover, lol. Three men in love with the same woman; their stories presented one by one. Bright Young French Things running around being champagne-y. Experimentalism limited to montage fade in\/fade out techniques so far. \u2026Oh ok, now there\u2019s some neat stream-of-consciousness stuff with lampposts. \u2026Wow, people in the 1920s really did not like lips! There are some aggressively-framed shots with geometric backgrounds\u2014kinda obvious, but I like that stuff. In the same scene, there are some lovely bits of choreography e.g. a woman being pulled into the camera shot by her hand, or two men almost waltzing into frame as they light one another\u2019s cigarettes. A great, creepy, low-slung shot of an elevator rising, making it look as if it\u2019s traversing some kind of post-apocalyptic blasted warehouse landscape. Second segment: a monkey! There\u2019s some great (original?) music, like a reverberating jew\u2019s-harp; then, in the third segment, a more traditional skirling, longing sound, which apparently is a Vivaldi piccolo concerto. Great horror-movie music while the \u201cintruder\u201d (?) speeds past a danger marker\u2026 and then the Vivaldi again. And then possibly at the end all three men were really one man??? Do not understand that part.<\/p>\n Le Tempestaire<\/strong>: Seasick shakycam credits. Painterly shot-by-shot, like a Viewfinder, of a seaside village and its inhabitants. Low-key, slow-moving \u201cshe fears for her man at sea, so she goes to persuade the old witch doctor to work his weather magic once again\u201d tale; some really cool shots of the sea reversing and calming. Several missing subtitles (including the last line!).<\/p>\n Romance sentimentale<\/strong>: Sergei Eisenstein. Intense, dramatic shots of the sea and falling trees, with the crash of branches paralleled to the crash of waves. Really great use of reflections and water-distortions. The music is original and mostly traditional with interruptions. Then we cut unexpectedly between a drawing-room with sculptures and a woman and a clock, and the leafless autumn forest. Then cheesy fireworks and more intense intercutting! \u2026And then it\u2019s spring for some reason. This is why I wish they\u2019d translated the Russian song the lady sings. (Despite the Yalien colleague who always laughed, \u201cJust learn the f***ing language!\u201d)<\/p>\n Autumn Fire<\/strong>: Ehhhh, (nearly-) wordless love poem.<\/p>\n Manhatta<\/strong>: Sentimental-modernist ode to NYC. Tall buildings and little anonymous ant-people. Some nicely-industrial piano music, but otherwise, no.<\/p>\n La coquille et le clergyman<\/strong>: Slow movie is sloooooooooooooooow. Koyaanisqatsi <\/em>is the freaking Micro Machines Man compared to this. It does seem to have a plot, but I truly can\u2019t be arsed to figure out what that plot is\u2014and bear in mind that I\u2019m already the kind of person who will watch six and a half hours of \u201cexperimental cinema of the 1920s and \u201830s.\u201d This is what you feared silent movies would be like.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a bit where the clergyman is crawling around all scrunched up like something out of Freaks <\/em>or Uzumaki<\/em>. I really liked that part.<\/p>\n Regen<\/strong>: Rain in a small city, with pretty (new) music. At its best, the music sounds like if the Raincoats circa \u201cHoney Mad Woman\u201d seriously mellowed out and had no instruments but a guitar and bass, but there are noodly bits which don\u2019t really go much of anywhere. Deeply nonessential, but painless.<\/p>\n H2O<\/strong>: Again with the rain! And then other forms of water, actually photographed in a striking, dynamic way, where each shot looks very different from the previous even though it\u2019s all just\u2026 you know\u2026 water. People as obsessed <\/a>as I am with sea metaphors<\/a> might really get a kick out of this. Also people who want a lovely alphabet of textures and shapes, different forms of motion. \u2026Wow, I love the series of cuts showing different kinds of rippling. It\u2019s a primer on \u201chow to film,\u201d sure, but it\u2019s a beautiful and compelling one. Ooohh <\/em>solarization now! \u2026Oh my gosh, I literally caught my breath just now. The solarized-Japanimation-silken-Rorschach-realist-staticky-molecular intertwining sequence of shots is just too much. <\/p>\n The (new) music is country-fried and demi-menacing.<\/p>\n
Uberfall<\/strong>: Police report of an assault; plotty, doesn\u2019t strike me as wildly experimental\u2013? There\u2019s a funny parallelism bit where a man paints a face on an egg and then breaks it in an egg-cup. \u2026OK, it gets experimental (distorted faces, dice and other bits from earlier in the film looming up eerily) after he actually gets assaulted, to show the effects of the blow to his head.<\/p>\n