Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/28/19

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

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

The Slow Business of Going (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2000)

The Slow Business of Going (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2000)

Cast: Lizzie Curry Martinez, Maria Tsansanoglou, Gary Price, Kenny Strickland, Daniel Aukin, Sandra Carter, Mike Martin, Lauryn Pithey-Petrie, Steve Moore. Screenplay: Jim Davis, Matthew Johnson, Tasca Shadix, Athina Rachel Tsangari. Cinematography: Deborah Eve Lewis. Art direction: Tom Dornbush. Film editing: Leah Bowers, Kyle Henry, Matthew Johnson, Athina Rachel Tsangari. Music: Mark Orton.

She is a camera. The protagonist, Petra Going (Lizzie Curry Martinez), travels the world recording her encounters with a video camera built into her eyes. Then others can access her experiences through the archive of her recordings. Which is pretty much what this oddly fascinating jumble of a film amounts to: episodes often improvised by the actors over the course of five years of filming. Director Athina Rachel Tsangari's first feature will never attract a wide audience, but its enigmas are often dazzling.