There are films that are a director's last produced work. But there are also final films, ones which have nothing to do with a career, but rather are pictures that face a cinematic abyss or void, the "end of the line." They travel to an edge you can sense, the farthest edge of a precipice, and they peer past, or look back, or look down and see the void reflected in themselves.
Jean-Pierre Melville's last film, Un flic, is also a final film, a picture that envisions the ruins laying beyond cinema's construction of society, of masculinity, of modernity, of genre. Within these ruins the only activity left to the inhabitants is ritual—perfected rites which imitate and re-live the standards of others and of the past—and a belief in ritual which seems the only escape from the pervasive nihilism and emptiness of the ruined world.
In this...
Jean-Pierre Melville's last film, Un flic, is also a final film, a picture that envisions the ruins laying beyond cinema's construction of society, of masculinity, of modernity, of genre. Within these ruins the only activity left to the inhabitants is ritual—perfected rites which imitate and re-live the standards of others and of the past—and a belief in ritual which seems the only escape from the pervasive nihilism and emptiness of the ruined world.
In this...
- 4/17/2013
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
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