Random Thoughts

Oooh. Oldee tymey Swedish movie. I haven’t really seen that much pre-50s Swedish stuff, I think?

This is a pretty unusual Criterion Eclipse box set. Virtually all of them are selections from a specific director, and there’s a couple sets that collects different directors working in the same idiom, but … this may be the only box set where the theme is the actor?

So this is a collection of (some of) Ingrid Bergman’s Swedish movies.

Hm, the technical … er… qualities are slightly lacking. I mean, basics like lighting and stuff.

And… framing… I mean, this looks like it’s been cropped, but apparently it was filmed this way?

Oh my god! Ingrid! She’s so young! And she speaks Swedish!

imdb claims that this was filmed in 1.37:1 (and the image on the imdb is pretty much that — 1.35:1), but it just seems so weird. It’s like the top and bottom of the frames are chopped off in basically every scene. It really looks like a narrower film that has been cut down to make it wider. But it’d be weird to cut a movie down to 1.35:1, so perhaps the camera operator was just kinda… not… good?

Or… perhaps the top/bottom of the film was of bad quality, and they decided to remove it during restoration? Because this has been nicely restored.

It’s fresh!!

I understand Swedish, but I’m glad this has English subtitles. There’s so much (I assume) 30s Swedish slang that it’d be pretty difficult to parse some of the repartee here. But the English translations are modern and slang free, and combined, the repartee is understandable and amusing.

Oooh, he’s evil!

This is a most amiable movie, even though (or perhaps because) the plot is pretty vague. It’s just a bunch of different characters that have several plot-lines going… it’s like a pre-proto soap opera thing?

He’s so evil that he’s out of focus!

I really liked this movie. It’s all kinds of wonky, put it manages to pull through on pure charm.

The Count of the Old Town. Edvin Adolphson, Sigurd Wallén. 1935.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

Wha. That’s one of the murals from the Mur murs documentary… so Varda did this at the same time as the documentary? Is it a fiction about doing a documentary about murals in Los Angeles? I hope so!

This is absolutely enthralling.

This is so meta. It’s the most 80s movie ever, and Varda captured it all at the start of the decade. They’re having this woman do the voice-over for a documentary they’ve made about murals in LA…

… and when they play it back, it’s Varda herself from the Mur murs movie. Tres post-modernique.

I love it.

Documenteur. Agnès Varda. 1981.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

So this is a decade later than Varda’s three previous California movies?

Oh, this is a documentary about murals in Los Angeles?

This is fantastic. It’s got a free-flowing delightful kind of flow. And these murals are pretty amazing.

I’m guessing that funding for this sort of thing dried up when Reagan came into office?

Varda’s really good at… well… everything… and the subject matter is interesting. But the people she’s interviewing aren’t saying anything fascinating. So I’m getting a bit bored. It was much better at the start when it was more abstract.

As the movie progresses, it becomes a bit pedestrian? It might just come down to Varda’s music choices. The soundtrack is a total mish-mash of … everything, but nothing is distinctive or interesting.

I really love Varda’s choice of having that guy on the voice-over recite the names of the mural artists whenever we shift to a new shot. At first I didn’t quite understand — I thought he was perhaps saying what streets the murals were on? But no. It’s clever. Putting the names on the screen would be distracting, but having the guy almost-whisper their names has an impact.

Heh! It’s hare krishnas selling Alice Coltrane albums! I’ve got that one!

That is very cheap!

Amazing. There was a slaughterhouse in LA that employed two painters for 12 years (!) to paint the entire huge plant (killing 6K pigs per day) with these bucolic images.

That’s what I want my bathroom to look like!

Mur Murs. Agnès Varda. 1980.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

I’m enjoying this movie… but… I can’t help wondering how this would have played out of it had had French actors instead of American actors. These people just don’t seem… intriguing? Especially the guys. And since so much of this seems improvised, that’s a problem.

OK, I’m getting into this now.

Yeah, whenever the two guys are on screen, it just gets less interesting. It’s like they’re trying to make things TotAlly KooKy, and instead it just gets… community theatre.

Oh, the two guys are the people who wrote the music for Hair.

There’s the germ of a brilliant movie in here. The meta stuff is a lot of fun. But then it goes into long improvised scenes that aren’t… thrilling… and Varda gets bored herself with the actors and does quick fast-forwards and stuff, and that’s fun, too, but it doesn’t really fix the major problem here: That the Hair guys are really boring.

Hehe. Shirley refuses to do the movie, so Agnés has to step in instead.

No, Shirley’s back!

I love this scene.

The ending here is just amazing. Brilliant. But that’s the thing with this movie: It has these shockingly vivid scenes that makes me go “THIS IS THE BEST MOVIE EVER” and then there’s two more scenes with the Hair guys that… do not… work.

So this is a thrilling movie. In parts. Those parts really make it worthwhile to watch this, but overall it’s not that compelling. So:

Lions Love… and Lies. Agnés Varda. 1969.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

This is brilliant. Varda’s having a lot of fun with doing a documentary and then questioning whether it’s fiction or not.

It’s overwhelming. It’s very Godard.

This is brilliant.

Uncle Yanco. Agnès Varda. 1967.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.