Melville’s Army of Shadows and Shepitko’s The Ascent in the same month… hot take here but fuck the Nazis
Harrowing as goddamn anything, but what Shepitko and her cinematographers accomplished here, and where and when the exhaustive naturalism pitches with Alfred Schnittke’s astounding music into something damn near divine… Ugh. Essential. Mandatory watching.
A cruelest and unforgiving winter subjugated and weaponized by the Third Reich, environment and personhood alike pulled into the vast Nazi machinery spitting out either quivering traitors or the cold and icy murdered.
The focuses on such brutal wartime intimacies…. the snuggled survival of sickly freezing comrades, two prisoners doomed to the same destination locking eyes and nearly touching foreheads, a torturer’s gentle caresses before the red-hot iron, the condemned holding each other…. unfuckingbelievable.
Oooooooouuuuuuugggghhhhh Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977) 😮💨😩 Jesus and Judas as the hunting, torture, and imprisonment of two Soviet partisans, loyalty to the death and betrayal at the gallows under Axis agonies, in the most miserably meticulous snowscape Hellscape you can possibly imagine.
The few moments where the unflinching facade cracks into tears or sobs makes the drone and empty gazes so much more haunting. Bresson blending real history and cinematic legacy with his own continuing invention, his Joan a ghost of Yet to Come for his nihilistic college students and suicidal lovers.
Dreyer cast Joan as an expressionist messiah, Bresson deprives the story of even nearly the essentials. A spartan cinematic brutality that highlights the absurdity and monstrosity of this young woman’s entrapment, torture, and destruction. Unadorned, toneless, chilling in its absences.
While I certainly don’t share his distaste towards Dreyer’s Passion masterpiece, Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) is SUCH a necessary deflation of grandiose mythologizing. Cold and dehumanizing as dungeon stone, ancient court text given stark life in claustrophobic black and white.
Ngozi Ukazu is one of the only people I’ve ever seen dive into the Kirbyesque pentameter in which Darkseid speaks in those original comics. The flow and cadence of his speech bubbles, waxing lyrical in Fourth World Verse. A joy to read, the best stuff these characters have had in a very long time.
The dude that slips on his ass is still one of the funniest fucking things I’ve ever seen
The fact that it looks like this the entire runtime, with moments of truly breathcatching beauty and ethereality in tandem with its classical stream of consciousness score, while being one of the funniest fucking comedies ever made. Sheer, painterly shenanigans and dumbassery.
Weekend (1967), Jean-Luc Godard See this is why I can’t fault Bi Gan having the gall to do an obituary to cinema the Concept™️ as only his third movie, Johnny-Luke was out here acting like the French New Wave was the final zenith of a dead artform that he personally murdered 😂😂😂
Masaru nuzzling his head into the small of Shinji’s back on that bikeride while the Joe Hisaishi swells is just full stop the kinda thing movies are for, man