Category Archives: film

Don and Dreams

PCL linkdump has a trailer (listen to those drums) from the 1978 film Don and via Greencine comes the Google video of Man Ray and Hans Richter’s Dreams that Money Can Buy.

More on Dreams and the people who made a new soundtrack for it:

“This is a Story of Dreams mixed with Reality”.

When Marek first showed me Hans Richter’s film ‘Dreams that Money Can Buy” as a potential project, I knew from this introductory salvo that I was in. It’s a difficult, deeply flawed film in many ways but it is also remarkable, extraordinary, ground-breaking, massively influential, comic and poignant in turns. It says things about Surrealism, film, art, the American Dream, dreaming in general and the emergence of therapy-practitioners as the new priestly elite, that hadn’t been said before – and possibly haven’t since. It captures the mysterious, confusing, meaningless-meaningfulness of Dreaming in a way that few films have – apart from perhaps David Lynch’s work – and it’s obviously no coincidence that Lynch himself has declared it as a major influence. —theclerkenwellkid

Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) – Man Ray, Hans Richter

I wrote this summary on Wikipedia, feel free to contribute:

Dreams That Money Can Buy is a 1947 American experimental feature color film written, produced, and directed by surrealist artist and dada film-theorist Hans Richter.

Collaborators included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Fernand Léger.


It won a special prize at the 1947 Venice Film Festival.

 

See also: surrealism in film

Lunacy: new Svankmajer

David Hudson at greencine reports on a new film by Jan Švankmajer.

Here is the trailer.

Wikipedia has this:

Lunacy, also known as Sílení is a 2005 film by Jan Švankmajer. The film is loosely based on two short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade.

And here is a sample of Švankmajer’s sculptural work:

Beethoven by Arcimboldo (1993) – Jan Švankmajer
image sourced here.

Aug 2006 update: The Evening Class has two excellent posts: one with YouTube footage here and one on Lunacy here.

Blind Beast

Blind Beast (1969) – Yasuzo Masumura

[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

 

Dadanoias has a video excerpt of the 1969 film Blind Beast, which I recently had the pleasure of seeing at the Brussels Arenberg cinemas.

I cannot recommend the whole film, but the first 15 minutes are beautiful (the gallery scene, the first scene in the warehouse with the sculptures of the body parts). The entire middle sequence is boring. The final scene is hilariously and grotesquely entertaining. The scene that Dadanoias has found (via El Blog Rarito) is from the end of the first 15 minutes, where the blind sculptor is trying to catch the girl in vain). Note the music by Hikaru Hayashi. The film is based on a novel by Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo.

Useful violence?

Just saw V for Vendetta.


It seemed as if nobody smoked cigarettes in the film, but this review says otherwise.

I enjoyed the film a lot. It reminded me of Complicity (1993) by Iain Banks.

The most memorable line was “Violence can be used for good” uttered by master kriminal V. It struck me in its Dutch translation “Geweld kan ook zinvol zijn.” Currently Flemish media are full of news on zinloos geweld (gratuitous violence). So I am always wondering about its opposite: zinvol geweld (necessary or useful violence). V says violence can be good for justice.

Most memorable songs are Cry me a river and Street Fighting Man.

Rating: psychological realism 3/10, cult value 6/10, feelgood factor 9/10

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

Features Tchaikovsky’s piece the 1812 Overture.

For full analyses of the film see K-punk and Steven Shaviro.