No 1: Oil Lamps (Herz, 1971): Regent Street Cinema, 4.45pm
This film is part of the Made in Prague festival. Details here.Blueprint review:
When the director Juraj Herz gave us the soot-tinged, black and white bite of The Cremator
audiences would likely have been surprised to hear he’d wanted to shoot
the film in colour. He’d imagined a world rendered all the more drab
and grey by picking out a few highlight colours – notably blood red.
Cinematographer, Stanislav Milota felt it wouldn’t work and they stuck
with black and white. Oil Lamps vindicates Herz’s earlier idea. The film is the story of Štěpa Kiliánová (Iva Janžurová), an
independent and admirably fierce young woman trapped both by the slow
birth of the twentieth century and the parochial town in which she
lives. She wants love and marriage but nobody finds her remotely
suitable for either. For all the gaudy frills of decadence she surrounds
herself with – she’s never happier than when carousing at the theatre –
her world is misery and fin de siècle rot. Knowing that she’s on a path
to regret, she pins her hopes on marriage to her cousin, ex-soldier,
Pavel Malina (Petr Čepek). She’s won over as he teaches her to shoot,
lured by the violence and illusion of dignity a soldier’s uniform can
possess… as long as it stays on the peg. Malina’s brother and father are all for the idea, Kiliánová’s dowry
will save their beleaguered farm. Kiliánová’s father, meanwhile would
“rather stuff every penny into a dead dog’s arse.” Soon she will hoist
her bridal veil, offering her lips to a man who cannot bring himself to
kiss them. A wedding party will elongate the night like a wake, loaded
down with mournful songs, shadows and the threat of worse to come. Every frame of Herz’s film is interlaced with soil and shit and
regret. A tragedy, draped in funereal blacks, inevitable, painful and
beautiful. It’s as lavish as a worm-food apple, as rich and opulent as a body dragged from the canal.
Guy Adams
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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No 2: Cenote (Ode, 2019): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm
Screen Slate review:
In the span of three features, Kaori Oda has established herself as
one of the foremost practitioners of the kind of immersive documentary
filmmaking pioneered, at least in part, by the Sensory Ethnography Lab,
with films like Sweetgrass and Leviathan. Oda’s Cenote
(2019) returns to an experimental mode, albeit with significantly
more formal variations. The documentary plunges into the deep, intricate
Mexican sinkholes that give it its name; cenotes were water sources for
the Mayans and were believed to act as conduits between the world and
the afterlife. Today, they still exert a pull on the tropical jungle
communities, especially physically. Because the pits possess strong,
unexpected currents, many people have fallen in and drowned,
accidentally or intentionally. Oda’s ultimate achievement is to situate
them in a real, tangible place, in a conception of culture that still
manages to accurately reflect the unique blend of happenstance,
tradition, and myth that form human experience. A uniformly, often
eerily beautiful film, Cenote understands that the meaning and
effect of a place is often immeasurably influenced by the point of view:
a camera and light pointed there, a story told there.
Ryan Swen
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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