I like to imagine this entire project as an elaborate world-building exercise to justify in lore why La Liberté's boobs are out in that Delacroix painting.
Egon Schiele + Bosch + Yellow Submarine =
Seriously, can't help but think it's a pity this film's relentless misogyny will keep me from ever teaching it to undergrads. (If someone wants to argue for this as feminist text I'm all ears and ready to laugh at you.)
The weird shift in protagonists made sense to me when I started thinking of the film as enacting a collision of two narrative modes. One, Gu's, is the classical - which is to say, modern - mode of the psychologically-driven, goal-oriented hero. He's got a clearly-defined personality with desires, hopes, strengths and weaknesses; he's got a clear narrative arc, changing in response to major story developments. He's a bit of a tragic buffoon - something perhaps not clear until the…
"If the Soviet cinema no longer gives us the equivalent of Potemkin or Hollywood the equivalent of Sunrise, Hallelujah, It Happened One Night, or even of Stagecoach..."
That's Andre Bazin, in his "In Defense of Mixed Cinema." Stumbling across that line I had one of those filmshistorical gobsmacked moments – this Hallelujah film I'd never heard of, placed in such august company.
And having seen it now, well, yes. What you'll read elsewhere is true: the music is sublime; the representational…
Astonishingly expressive color; astonishingly dense mise-en-scene. Felt a bit like von Sternberg meeting up with Sirk, or even better Querelle-era Fassbinder doing Sirk. Eye-popping, campy, graphic, sexy, never a boring moment.
