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Topic: Art Films and other pretentious Delights  (Read 14360 times)

eldritchhat

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights
"I found out I was actually a Nazi. My family were German. What can I say? I understand Hitler … I sympathize with him a bit.”
-Lars Von Trier

If you know what this mess is all about, and love watching Kirsten Dunst's reaction to it, then this is the right thread for you.

We can discuss our interpretations of the work of David Lynch and Ingmar Bergman, or just post links to the weird and hilarious shit these people make:

like this

Either way, I was hankering for a thread like this, so I might as well start it.
CormansInferno

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #1
"I found out I was actually a Nazi. My family were German. What can I say? I understand Hitler … I sympathize with him a bit.”
-Lars Von Trier

If you know what this mess is all about, and love watching Kirsten Dunst's reaction to it, then this is the right thread for you.

We can discuss our interpretations of the work of David Lynch and Ingmar Bergman, or just post links to the weird and hilarious shit these people make:

like this

Either way, I was hankering for a thread like this, so I might as well start it.
eldritchhat, January 19, 2016, 11:46:32 am
Consider me up in this thread like my boy Kris Klien is up in Solaris

montrith

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #2
Ever seen  L'Âge d'Or? That's some weird shit going on there. Not surprising since Salvador Dali was involved.

I'm not sure what kind of artsy films you're looking for, but I personally have a thing for short, surreal films. I especially like animations and films that combine music with picture (no dialogue necessary). Finnish TV used to show a lot of weird shit from former Soviet Block countries, especially Poland, so that might have influenced my tastes somewhat. Here's a good resource for some titles of Polish films, you can actually find many of the shorter ones on Youtube. Warning! Probably horribly bleak and weird.

http://monsterkidclassichorrorforum.yuku.com/topic/4050/Horror-from-Beyond-the-Iron-Curtain?page=2#.Vp5_xFKzmao

Here's one that I think has an interesting ending, if any of you wants to offer an interpretation.


Here's The Cathedral, based on a short story by Jacek Dukaj, and it just looks damn nice. Also check out Fallen Art by the same director if you want to see something more fucked up.


I'm not sure if this counts as an "art" film, but here's Aleksandr Petrov's adaptation of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, done using paint-on-glass technique.


Sorry if this is not what you were looking for, but the Polish ones should at least stir up some interesting conversations, if you ever manage to get anyone to sit through them.

Boots Raingear

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #3
JODOROWSKY

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #4
I like art films. The ones that came to mind right away were "Celine and Julie Go Boating", "The Reflecting Skin",  and "Něco z Alenky". While I have seen and enjoyed? been moved by? Lars Von Trier's works before, (I don't know if you can use the word "enjoy when you're talking about something like "Breaking the Waves"), the man himself does not seem like someone I'd particularly like to have dinner with. Is David Lynch still arty or is he too mainstream now? How about Cronenberg?

eldritchhat

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #5
Thank you Montrith, once again you are the paramount example for us all. I probably should've called this "experimental films and blah blah blah," but Que sera sera. Your contributions are exactly what I am looking for.

JODOROWSKY
Boots Raingear, January 19, 2016, 02:44:45 pm

YES! Jodorowsky is a goddamn god, and I applaud you for being the first one to mention him. Concerning him and David Lynch, have you ever seen the documentary about his amazing ideas for a Dune movie? It's a shame on the human race that he was never able to make it.

I like art films. The ones that came to mind right away were "Celine and Julie Go Boating", "The Reflecting Skin",  and "Něco z Alenky". While I have seen and enjoyed? been moved by? Lars Von Trier's works before, (I don't know if you can use the word "enjoy when you're talking about something like "Breaking the Waves"), the man himself does not seem like someone I'd particularly like to have dinner with. Is David Lynch still arty or is he too mainstream now? How about Cronenberg?
NutshellGulag, January 19, 2016, 03:19:30 pm

Lars Von Trier is a masterful film maker, I actually watched Anti-christ on Christmas eve last year, and Melancholia a few days after. I can also entirely agree that I would not want to talk to him for more than a few seconds on anything other than film.

David Lynch is definitely arty, and anyone who says otherwise can suck a leaky faucet. I love Twin Peaks, Elephant Man, Eraserhead, and all of his shorts, like this one:


Many artists will live and die, but Cronenberg is forever, remember that nutshell. Besides, who can not admire the man that made Jeff Goldbloom even creepier.



Back to montrith, Stairs was great, I will need to check out other creations by that artist. While obviously not the same thing, it reminded me a bunch of Aardman's stranger shorts:


If I had to give a quick interpretation of Stairs, and bear in mind that I have no formal training in film theory, I would say that it is a very Nietzschean idea portrayed here, a very harsh nihilistic truth portrayed through a medium generally regarded as fantastic and childish (hi Portaxx!). It is about the nature of life's intricacies, which slowly develop as one grows older, and the fact that there are infinite paths that, even if you choose to stick to one, the most you can hope for is a death at the top, so you can become another step on the path of knowledge. It is a very cynical representation of the ultimate effect of 'active' nihilism.

Hope this helps! :D

CormansInferno

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #6
I've had the enourmous good fortune to live near The Cinefamily, LA's greatest arthouse. While they've lost a bit of momentum (due to a lot of their programmers moving on to other things), I estimate I've seen at least 3500-4000 movies/pieces of visual media there. I have a couple people to recommend, but I'll start with Sion Sono.

I am extremely glad that Sono has become a giant, commercially-successful director in Japan, because his movies are straight out of the same gonzo art playbook that Jodorowsky and Lynch consult. Sono was originally a student at one of Japan's most prestigious art schools, then saw The Gore Gore Girls and Blood Feast and decided he should spend his entire career making high-minded trashploitation. Fans of extreme Japanese cinema might remember his first feature, Suicide Circle, or at least the scene from it where a line of Japanese schoolgirls hold hands and jump into the path of an oncoming subway. And while all his movies are at least worth a look, The HATE Trilogy is where he started reaching his true artistic heights. It all started when he conceived Love Exposure a 6 hour Valentine to his then-current girlfriend, the raw cut of which was taken from him by distributors and chopped down to 4 hours. This is not a navel-gazing European realism film, the 10-act plot crackles with the energy of binge-watching four episodes of an intense hour-long drama. Even more impressive is that every act shifts to a different genre but all manages to stay in one coherent universe, telling the story of Yu, an eternally suffering Japanese Catholic, and Yoko, a juvenile delinquent obsessed with Jesus. The result was a movie that became the #1 box office hit for 6 months in Japan.

Unfortunately, during the production of Love Exposure, the girlfriend Sono made it for broke up with him and drove him into a depressive funk that inspired the next 2 films in the trilogy, Coldfish and Guilty of Romance, two bleak, nihilistic looks at human sexuality and relationships. Coldfish, about the horrors of male sexuality, follows a businessman whose family becomes romantically entwined with an aquarium store owner/serial killer (apparently based on a real Japanese serial killer who was a dog breeder). In Guilty of Romance, the dark side of female sexuality is explored via a lonely housewife who becomes obsessed with the decadence and perversion of her local red-light district as her novellist husband starts growing distant from her. While he was making the latter, Sono and the lead actress fell in love and married shortly afterward.

But while those are three of his greatest films, everything he's done is at least worth a look. I'd also recommend Love & Peace, a delightful and heartwarming mash-up of Miracle on 34th Street and Gamera, Why Don't You Play in Hell?, his love letter to film where a crew of movie geeks get to film a real Yakuza battle to the death in 35 mm, and Ex-Te, his pisstake on mid-Aughts Japanese ghost movies featuring possessed hair extensions and Chiaki Kuriyama (Go Go Yubari from Kill Bill).
« Last Edit: January 19, 2016, 05:38:52 pm by CormansInferno »

EYE OF ZA

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #7
Here's one that I think has an interesting ending, if any of you wants to offer an interpretation.

montrith, January 19, 2016, 01:14:17 pm

My interpretation: The sandy expanse at the beginning is raw possibility, out of which comes a sign that seems to give us a purpose.  Stairs, that way?  Guess we need to go that way.  We take the purpose and pursue it, even as we lose track of what we were doing before (as the angles of the shots get stranger and we can no longer walk straight forward).  We pursue the purpose, giving it our all until we can't give any more.  What the ending reveals is that what seemed like a grand purpose was all man-made, all created by other people who also thought they were pursuing the same purpose.

eldritchhat

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #8
Here's one that I think has an interesting ending, if any of you wants to offer an interpretation.

montrith, January 19, 2016, 01:14:17 pm

My interpretation: The sandy expanse at the beginning is raw possibility, out of which comes a sign that seems to give us a purpose.  Stairs, that way?  Guess we need to go that way.  We take the purpose and pursue it, even as we lose track of what we were doing before (as the angles of the shots get stranger and we can no longer walk straight forward).  We pursue the purpose, giving it our all until we can't give any more.  What the ending reveals is that what seemed like a grand purpose was all man-made, all created by other people who also thought they were pursuing the same purpose.
EYE OF ZA, January 19, 2016, 06:18:59 pm

Ah, but that's the thing, if we refuse to pursue purpose whatsoever, then we are what Nietzsche refers to as 'passive' nihilists. Even if the increment is ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme, you are still creating something by an increment, which is more than what you could say for the passive person. Perhaps we should interpret this film as realism represented through surrealism, the veneer of our personal ideologies washed away. As Slavoj Zizek said, the glasses should be the rose color of ideology, and when we take them off, we should see critique of ideology. But, we should also consider Lacan's idea of the 'real,' where the very act of putting the glasses on legitimizes our meaningless existence, as well as stands in as the obstacle between us and concrete legitimization.

But, I think the figure was featureless for a reason, so the further I go into pontification, the farther I am from what is actually present within the film.

Anyhow, let me add another film on the barby while we're at it. Speaking of animation, I love Don Hertzfeldt, even if he was popular enough to make a Simpsons intro:


I have not yet seen his latest movie, World of Tomorrow, but I still love going back and watching his Oscar-winning  short film:

Ambious

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #9
If you ever get the chance to watch Melancholia- don't!
There's a thin line between artsy, pretentious and just plain bad - and this film is so beyond this line it's literally torture to watch.

eldritchhat

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #10
If you ever get the chance to watch Melancholia- don't!
There's a thin line between artsy, pretentious and just plain bad - and this film is so beyond this line it's figuratively torture to watch.
Ambious, January 20, 2016, 04:06:04 am

I actually quite liked the film, but I can understand why someone might not.
If you don't mind, Ambious, could you please tell us why it was so deplorable?

Ambious

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #11
If you ever get the chance to watch Melancholia- don't!
There's a thin line between artsy, pretentious and just plain bad - and this film is so beyond this line it's figuratively torture to watch.
Ambious, January 20, 2016, 04:06:04 am

I actually quite liked the film, but I can understand why someone might not.
If you don't mind, Ambious, could you please tell us why it was so deplorable?
eldritchhat, January 20, 2016, 04:14:51 am

It could just be me - or perhaps I had a bad viewing experience - but I just couldn't follow it.
I understand it's meant to be a metaphor, but it went too far in that I couldn't pinpoint actual plot points and it was just too slow and inconsistent to process which in turn made it boring and long as hell.
Again - the 'art' behind the film may be good, but I was so unable to actually even remotely connect to anything I wasn't even able to try and appreciate anything else.

eldritchhat

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #12
If you ever get the chance to watch Melancholia- don't!
There's a thin line between artsy, pretentious and just plain bad - and this film is so beyond this line it's figuratively torture to watch.
Ambious, January 20, 2016, 04:06:04 am

I actually quite liked the film, but I can understand why someone might not.
If you don't mind, Ambious, could you please tell us why it was so deplorable?
eldritchhat, January 20, 2016, 04:14:51 am

It could just be me - or perhaps I had a bad viewing experience - but I just couldn't follow it.
I understand it's meant to be a metaphor, but it went too far in that I couldn't pinpoint actual plot points and it was just too slow and inconsistent to process which in turn made it boring and long as hell.
Again - the 'art' behind the film may be good, but I was so unable to actually even remotely connect to anything I wasn't even able to try and appreciate anything else.
Ambious, January 20, 2016, 04:41:15 am

I get that. Even though I like the film, it does feel somewhat meandering, in the second part at least.
However, what may be a detractor for you, that being that it was basically just the filmmaker wallowing in his own depression, was what made the movie for me. I have a history of depression, and I believe that Kirsten Dunst's performance alone gives me great incentive to watch, and allows me to personally identify with her.
Ultimately, the movie was about the relationship between the two sisters, which can be great if you have a personal investment in both those characters, but if either falls flat for you, then the movie just kinda falls apart.

Anyway, that film is definitely not for everyone, as most Lars Von Trier films aren't. If anyone wants to watch another movie about the relationship between a group of characters, one that has a little bit more humor and action to it, then I would recommend Tangerine. You've most likely heard about it as the movie that was shot entirely on an iPhone, but I would say the more interesting aspect of the film, to me, is that the majority of the cast is made up of trans women. You can watch it streamed on Netflix, and it's worth the watch, if you don't mind seeing an Armenian give someone a blow job, from the back seat of a taxi, while at the car wash.

eldritchhat

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #13
I woke up at 4:30 this morning and couldn't fall back to sleep, so I watched the movie Montrith recommended: L'Âge d'Or

I definitely recommend that you guys see it, as I feel like its right up our perspective alleys, so I'll post it here so you all can watch and maybe talk about it.

CormansInferno

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Art Films and other pretentious Delights #14
My next recommendation is to check out the films of Sky-David. In the mid-70s, a former soldier wandered around California doing some soul searching after his had been obliterated by the nightmares of Vietnam and wound up at CalArts. After learning animation over the course of the next 3 years, he renamed himself Sky-David and went on to create a number of short films that wordlessly drift through hallucinatory landscapes. The one exception is Field of Green, an antiwar piece he made to discourage Army recruitment in the Bush II years, which animates entries from his war journals. Even if you've never seen an S-D short, you might've seen his art style. His 2nd student film, Luma Nocturna, was licensed by Ken Russell and used in the enlightenment/reality folding in on itself sequences from Altered States; and based off the strength of that he was hired to do the hallucinatory transitions for the Randy Quaid horror vehicle Dreamscape. It can be kind of hard to track down his work, but here's a brief sample:

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