Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 06/27/19

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

Thursday, June 27, 2019

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)

Miriam Toews and Maria Pankratz in Silent Light

Cast: Cornelio Wall, Miriam Toews, Maria Pankratz, Peter Wall, Jacobo Klassen, Elizabeth Fehr. Screenplay: Carlos Reygadas. Cinematography: Alexis Zabe. Art direction: Nohemi Gonzalez. Film editing: Natalia López.

A kind of holiness suffuses Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light, a film set in a Mexican community of Mennonites who speak entirely in Plautdietsch, their dialect of German. The actors in the film are real people summoned to play characters who might have existed in their own community, so from the outset there's a strange feeling of otherness transcended into universality. One of the universals of the film is the eternal triangle of a man married to a woman but in love with another woman. Another is the cycle of day and night: The film begins with a day's slow dawning. And then there's the mystery of life and death, epitomized in a scene of resurrection that has inevitably made critics compare the film to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955). Silent Light is a simpler story than the one that great film tells, but also entirely worthy of the comparison.