Letterboxd — Your life in film

Produced to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution but its sympathies blatantly lie with the monarchy. Within its regressive logic, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen it paraphrases at its conclusion is but a wistful compromise set off by the errors of a king who was a poor administrator. Its purported neutrality praised by critics: nothing but liberal finger waving at the political power of crowds and mobilizations in history. Truly the blandest of TV films but impossible to look away from as a capsule of French conservatism.

Metanarratives.

A not so and yet still-superhero film with the same amplified grandiloquence to boot. But in this instance, the auteur, long established as M. Night Shyamalan, precedes the auteurists in recuperating the film's aesthetics and politics. It should surprise no one that auteurism fits so well with contemporary neoliberal success narratives and Hollywood solipsism, of which this film is one example among many.

Watch Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents to see Nanook (reinterpreted by Chicano Anthony Quinn) suffer the colonial wound and discover the bones on which modernity was built on.

"The crowd loves strong men." - Mussolini

"The camera looks for the new important man. In the jostling crowd, it tries to lay hold of Ion Iliescu.” – Harun Farocki, Videograms of a Revolution (1992)

Juan Perón. To the right of Che and collaborator with right wing factions of Argentina, but somehow a subject worthy of veneration for leftists Solanas and Getino in this two-hour interview where they allow Perón (from his exile in Francoist Spain) to play the vanguardist. Peronism, the Argentine third position, always struck me as a personality cult led by opportunists. But this really puts it into perspective.

More épater la bourgeoisie than political. And rather efficient at that, considering its director. But ultimately a useless film, apart from its value as a litmus test.

It matters a lot who is behind the camera. If the topics remained intact and this were a film by, say Tariq Teguia, and the industry somehow allowed it the same production, exposure, and access to music rights. Then my bullshit meter wouldn't have gone off the scale as quickly.

There's the portrayal and adaptation of James Baldwin and his memoir, respectively, and then there is the portrait, which is this documentary as a form. For all the prestige and seriousness the former grants to the latter, this yet another ugly reiteration of usual documentary modes in contemporary media, from its editing and typography, to the way photographs and music are used.

I am reminded of Mark Daniels and Melvin Van Peebles' Classified X for an excellent example of a documentary that is up to the task of facing America’s history of racism as lived through one person (in that case, Melvin Van Peebles).

Michael Boyce Gillespie thinks this is a bad film and I agree with him. That courtroom scene has more cuts than a Fast and The Furious car chase. Worst Burnett film I have seen.

A doomed love story told in flashback and whose chronotope is a Portuguese colony and the tensions of the era that would ultimately lead to the revolution of 1974. But these are merely backdrops for a higher concern: that romanticizing neo-colonialism is all right if you are doing one for the altar of b&w expressionism.

Guerrilla filmmaking that plays more like a home movie than a narrative film. I would say there is something to admire in the absence of simulacrum of the past, a certain anti-representation, but the costumes say otherwise. Still, I find the immaturity and amateurism of Rome ’78 far more tolerable than the auteur affected absurdity of Eugene Green’s Le monde vivant.

Strictly for fans of the no wave scene.