Back to my growing-up home in Maine for a week and a half. This was the view onto the world that greeted me here. Grim cold beauty...
And a week of esoteric watching. Along with reading Caroline Finkel's Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire and Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy, I'm going to be watching/rewatching the following films that I hurriedly ripped onto my computer before I left:
It's Alive 2: It Lives Again
Phantasm
This Sporting Life
Hatchet for a Honeymoon
His Kind of Woman
Burn!
The Devil
Pierrot Le Fou
Distant
Witchfinder General
No reason whatsoever for this grouping, simply what I grabbed. Having watched the first two (It's Alive 2: It Lives Again and Phantasm) on planes and buses, I have the illusion of some deep running common thread through these films for me to chase down. Mostly, though, I'll share my thoughts on these as I go (and invite any of the collective yours on the films of this awkward personal viewing series).
And I start with just an image-thought, the transition from the ontological horror and anxiety that comes from confronting your own monstrous off-spring/mutant baby who happens to be a killing machine...
... to the moment of shattering jouissance when you finally take the little fanged bastard into your arms and accept him as your own.
Burn! is brilliant - I think the companion to Black Skin White Masks (as The Battle of Algiers is to The Wretched of the Earth). Also Witchfinder General has often been analysed as an English Western, and happens to be a great film as well.
ReplyDeleteI have Satantango to watch - seven and a half hours b/w reflection on the end of communism - I really like to live the cliche of the intellectual...
I love Witchfinder General (originally titled Conqueror Worm as a way to cash in on the earlier Vincent Price "adaptations" of Poe stories and poems). I'm saving that for the flight back...
ReplyDeleteSatantango is also awaiting me, though I might need to intersperse it with something less like a reflection on the end of communism. And something more like whiskey and tears.