Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/28/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, April 28, 2019

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (Karel Zeman, 1962)

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (Karel Zeman, 1962)

Not as reined-in as his wonderful 1958 tribute to Jules Verne, Invention for Destruction, Karel Zeman's The Fabulous Baron Munchausen often has an anything-goes quality to its fantasy, which makes it a little too easy to detach yourself from its ongoing barrage of astonishing images. A revival of the film in the 1980s directly influenced Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), which suffers from a similar lack of groundedness.

Cast: Milos Kopecký, Rudolf Jelinek, Jana Brejchová, Karel Höger, Eduard Kohout, Jan Werich, Bohus Záhorský, Rudlof Hrusínský. Screenplay: Jirí Brdecka, Josef Kainar, Karel Zeman, based on a book by Gottfried August Bürger and stories by Rudolph Erich Raspe. Cinematography: Jirí Tarantik. Production design: Karel Zeman. Film editing: Vera Kutilova. Music: Zdenek Liska.