HALLOWEEN! (Or where I decide to watch every Pere Portabella film in October) Day 7

If Cuadecuc succeeds by finding a through-line between fiction and reality through Franco's absurdity then Umbracle complicates both by parodying the parody. In this sense Portabella's film is the cinematic equivalent of a series of footnotes to his main text, interesting in their own right but very hard to comprehend as a stand alone work.

Formally no other movies of his better captures what it…

The first red flag triggered during the opening credits as a smarmy reading of the directors reference material overlays a sharp colourisation of it's source. The form of reinterpretation of Marxist sources is something Godard explored in all his post 67 work however for all the panache in his career he never went as far as to redub an entire film usurping whatever intentions the creator had (Part of why Histoire(s) Du Cinema works so well is because during 20…

I spent my whole life wanting to be a mathematician. I excelled in it at primary school, continued it into secondary school where my capabilities made up for deficiencies in the social sciences and the like. This continued into college where I did my A Levels in Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry, letting the STEM grandeur take over and shedding all other pursuits as inquisitive hobbies. This narcissism only continued when my master’s application was accepted, narrowing my focus…

I’d never seen a horizon in my life. A long stretch passed from the heavenly days of 1978 to twenty years later where a fine scarlet chasm gulfed between the terran and the avian on a crisp Christmas morning. Malick was in his element. Gosling took centre, his furrowed fibonacci brow vanishing at the centre of his twenty-eight whites. Mara followed next, a perpendicular angle connects her forearm to her guitar, her fingers strumming to Klaus Wiese’s vision to a…