Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/18/22

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

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (Robert Eggers, 2015)

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (Robert Eggers, 2015)

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson, Julian Richings, Bathsheba Garnett, Sarah Stephens. Screenplay: Robert Eggers. Cinematography: Jarin Blaschke. Production design: Craig Lathrop. Film editing: Louise Ford. Music: Mark Ford.

Robert Eggers’s The Witch has a subtitle, A New-England Folktale, that is essential to understanding what the writer-director is up to with the film: an evocation of the state of mind of a place and period. (The hyphen in the subtitle is a deliberate archaism, as is the on-screen spelling “VVitch.”) Because without recognizing this aim, we are left with merely a genre piece, a horror movie to be reeled out every Halloween season. Or else we’re seeing a movie which asserts that the Puritans of 17th-century Salem, Mass., were justified in their persecution of women they thought to be witches. Both of those aims for the film hardly justify the care Eggers took in researching and re-creating the speech and the dress of the people who set out in the wilderness of America, not to mention their anxious, terrifying belief in both God and Satan. Eggers’s film is a work of art, as potent as the painting that may have inspired it, Francisco Goya's “Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat).” It’s an often harrowing film that transcends the genre it’s usually assigned to, thanks to meticulous production design and intelligently cast actors, then mostly unknown. (It was Anya Taylor-Joy’s first film.) If I have a quibble, it’s that my aging eyes have trouble with the cinematography, designed to use only available light (and dark), so others have seen things in its shadows, particularly in the abduction of the infant Samuel, where I saw only shapes and blurs. But that seems to be a feature of Eggers’s films, including The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022), and not a bug. An altogether satisfying debut for Eggers, as well as Taylor-Joy.