Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso), 1964, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni

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RED DESERT




He sees a red door and he wants to paint it black.
He sees a green field and he has to paint it grey.
What are the colors of the
spaces in between?
What is the texture of the pain
that is unseen?

He points out something that is not quite yet a fact.
He does it openly and yet behind your back.
Can you really tell a caress
from an attack? At random, people
circle, interact.


Cool colors fight with warm,
opening a crack.
Poison plumes of yellow smoke
roil up to scorch the sky; little birdies
have to learn to
fly the other way.


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METROPOLIS (1927, dir. Fritz Lang)

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METROPOLIS


Every bleak exciting city

emerging monochrome from the mist

owes a little debt

to Metropolis


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SYLVIA SCARLET (1935) starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant


Early in their careers,
Cary conjures the crooked rogue
and Katherine the gender bender.

When the crooked rogue
and the gender bender
don't end up in bed together

you have nice sequences
but a misdirected picture,
and three times Grant and Hepburn

must couple up
to make up for this mistake:
once in 1940 and twice in 1938

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The Philadelphia Story (1940)


If you were Katherine Hepburn
and labeled "box-office poison"
what would you do?

Get your newly-sober ex
and James Stuart
competing for you?

And what if, say, some guy
who used to be a miner
slipped a rock around your finger?

When you're in it, and the sun's
in your blodshot eye--
and people are calling you

"remote," "goddess" and "heartless"
left and right--
it's hard to know who'll win

but admit, it's elementary:

Dismiss the stiff with the diamond,
have a dalliance with young James,
and re-marry Cary--

just like in the play.

That's how you save
an acting career
and win the day--

not to mention, an Oscar

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Chungking Express (1994)


--If movies are to amuse us, must they always have conclusions?--



People disappear
and reappear

without meaning
or warning.

People retreat.
People repeat.

People are incomplete.
Stories do not conclude

interlude leads to interlude.
In the absence of love

objects may amuse us--
soap with an eating disorder

a dishtowel that weeps,
conspicuous sunglasses

and the mysterious comings and goings
of fish in a fishbowl

are witness
to an incomplete loneliness.

Daily life
like a shimmering flow

of incomplete brushstrokes
speeds round us, nonstop

yet if we slice that
open, isn't everyone

sealed in, alone, in slow-mo
with their troubles

which they love so



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view trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo_WlQ7OVSU

Shadows (1959) , Dir. John Cassavetes' first film

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Shadows (1959) , Dir. John Cassavetes

Simply the best

French New Wave cinema

ever to be made (in America)

--and all that jazz!!!


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clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ-rv2Or3YE&feature=related

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Ecstasy (1933) (Czech)

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Ekstase (1933), a/k/a Ecstasy

In The Most Whispered About Picture In The World
a marriage begins and ends
without dialogue.

When the young bride returns, still chaste, to
her father's home, he asks her what happened,
and she tells him: Nothing.

Soon enough something happens.
Clothes are minor discarded details
shed as easily as the need for words

and skinny-dipping naturally leads
to cunnilingus; the first non-porn female orgasm
on film; censorship; confiscation at the border, and burning.

The face of a Jewish princess in climax
is, by 1935, still too scandalous,
but eventually

scenes are inserted
to make Ecstasy more socially acceptable:
A pre-fling divorce, and a daydream of a baby--

because marriage and babies
are sacred, and not to be polluted
by pleasure

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Nude swimming clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7TnmjEFYuc&feature=PlayList&p=2ACDADB31DD47921&index=3