Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/03/19

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

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)

Cast: Mercedes Morán, Graciela Borges, Martín Adjemián, Leonora Balcarce, Silvia Baylé, Sofia Bertolotto, Juan Cruz Bordeu, Noelia Bravo Herrera, Andrea López, Sebastián Montagna, Daniel Valenzuela, Franco Veneranda, Fabio Villafane, Diego Baenas. Screenplay: Lucrecia Martel. Cinematography: Hugo Colace. Production design: Graciela Oderigo. Film editing: Santiago Ricci.

The members of an upper-middle-class Argentine family torment one another during the course of a sweltering summer spent at their country house. Lucrecia Martel established herself as one of the premier Latin American filmmakers with this, her first feature.