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LaNouvelleVague
http://www.shompy.com/lanouvellevague/l41816_ukuk.html
Reviews
The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
shadows of the opera
There's one scene that I can't get out of my head: about 10 minutes into the film, those ballet dancers' shadows perform and it's all projected onto a wall. The shadows almost dance. There's an initial ambiguity about whose shadows we are seeing: the shadows of performing dancers or the shadows of scared people who happen to be dancers.
How great is that?
A performance by an actor is layered upon a performance by a character, and it is given to us as a performance of a shadow puppet. The fact that the movie is a silent film and thus employs a silent film acting style, adds a fourth layer that audiences in the 20's missed out on.
Also, the way those ballet dancers do a twirl and then cower in fright is a nice touch. I wish a couple of those would have made it into the shadow puppet show.
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)
Bram's book; Hutter's book
Judging from the user comments, I saw this film differently from most people.
Murnau creates a vampire film after reading Bram Stoker's vampire book. Hutter creates a vampire after reading the vampire book he finds in his room. Ellen too after she reads the book.
It's interesting how the link between Murnau's creation and a book was so easily discovered (Stoker's widow sued), while the link between Hutter's creation and its book seems to have gone largely unnoticed (if you accept my reading of the film).
E. Elias Merhige and Steven Katz noticed. In their film "Shadow of the Vampire", they merely changed Black Death delirium/hysteria to drug-induced delirium/hysteria.
Some of the compositions are great. The stop-motion FX might seem a little jerky but that just adds to my reading of the film.
Krótki film o milosci (1988)
a short film about film
This is first and foremost about film, film making, and film viewing. Film viewing involves a sort of film making as you take the images and cobble them together, which is why different people can see different films from the same images given.
The boy is both the director and the viewer as he cobbles together the images from his telescope. The woman is both the film and the director, as she IS the image and decides what images to show him.
They meet and the film he created is not the film she is. Then at the end, film itself becomes the film maker/viewer. She creates the film and the boy has also become the film.
This is some great stuff here...film viewer as film maker...film creating film...life as film...film as life.
It is about love too. Romantic love is but a movie we create using films as source (it used to be literature).
Intelligent. Kieslowski.