Random Thoughts

I really enjoyed Rossellini’s Blaise Pascal, and I really disliked his Medici, and this one was made between those two — so what’s it going to be like?

So this one is about Descartes… and it seems more like the Blaise Pascal film.

In this scene, they’ve put Descartes before the horse.

Very odd makeup on Descartes — it’s like they just smudged his face with ashes?

This is very much like Blaise Pascal — the same acting style, the same meticulous, stylish sets — and it’s just as fascinating.

Now I’m starting to wonder whether I was too rash in ditching the Medici thing… I think I’ll give it another go.

Is that Prince?

I love the subtle soundtrack — Rossellini mostly uses unsettling drones in dramatic scenes. It’s positively Lynchian.

Yeah, it’s in two parts and two and a half hours in total.

I really love the set designs, the great sense of colours and the straightforward cinematography.

However, this isn’t quite as good as Blaise Pascal. That one really kept the interest up… I almost wrote “tension”, but that’s not quite correct, because these films don’t have much tension. Instead Blaise Pascal took us from one scene of intense interest to the next until it was done. This one has some flabby scenes that don’t seem to have much reason to be there — it’s almost as if Rossellini was just padding the length or something. Which he probably wasn’t!

It’s getting repetetive — we’ve gotten the “sure, sure, I’m gonna publish this; I just need to think about it a bit more” a dozen times now, and Descartes’ incessant travelling — it’s like a running gag, but not funny.

This film portrays Descartes’ intellectual life as a tragedy, I guess — he goes from his youthful optimism in deriving everything logically to his glib sophistry once he finally starts publishing.

Cartesius. Roberto Rossellini. 1974.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

Why haven’t those devices (for holding chilled water bags on foreheads) taken off all over the world?

Anyway, I’m having a hard time getting into this movie. There’s scens that are really fun (especially involving those sailors), but the main plot (about an out-of-work father and a geisha mother) just isn’t all that interesting. The cinematography is often quite accomplished, but there’s also a lot of scenes that are really indifferently filmed.

In short, it just seems like a film that’s been dashed off quickly (and Naruse did six films per year at this point).

I’m being a bit too critical here — this film has many good qualities, really. But this is what I feel like right now:

Every-Night Dreams. Mikio Naruse. 1933.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

So this is another one of these made-for-TV historical things Rossellini was doing? The first one, L’età di Cosimo de Medici, was horrible.

This looks a lot less something you’d punish school children with as homework for a history class and more like an actual movie.

The acting style is an odd hybrid — it’s not naturalistic, but neither is it just people declaiming their lines without emotion. Instead, they act like their natural state is to speak well-formed literary quotations — they speak in entire paragraphs.

So somewhere half-way between Bresson and Brando.

It’s cool.

This film is inexplicably entertaining. The mix of well-presented scientific theories and the general drama of Pascal’s life is just kind of gripping.

And it looks really good, so:

Blaise Pascal. Roberto Rossellini. 1972.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

As with several early Japanese films on the Eclipse box sets, this is more than a bit unrestored. Some scenes are extremely noisy.

Practical to have the baby in a backpack.

This is most amusing.

Flunky, Work Hard!. Mikio Naruse. 1932.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

OK, two box sets to go… this is the first film on the Silent Naruse set. And it is, indeed, silent. (Well, except for the soundtrack.)

The cinematography and editing on this is insane for a movie from 1931. Each shot lasts, like, two seconds, and most are much shorter. And whenever there’s something longer, the camera is always either being driven into somebody’s face or past some piece of furniture.

It’s like an acid house music video from 1991.

Naruse did 24 movies in 1930-34, but of these, 19 have been lost. So this box set (with five movies) has all of his surviving movies from this period.

This is a pretty charming movie. The camera antics were a lot of fun sto start with, but the constant zooming got to be pretty annoying as time went by. (The focus puller sure got a work out.) And while the storyline is pretty good, it seems to need something… more…

But it’s interesting, and it’s got some good gags. So:

No Blood Relation. Mikio Naruse. 1931.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.