Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/19/24

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, September 19, 2024

Here (Bas Devos, 2023)

Liyo Gong and Stefan Gota in Here

Cast: Stefan Gota, Liyo Gong, Cédric Luvuezo, Teodor Corban, Saadia Bentaïeb, Alida Constantin, ShuHuan Wang, Victor Claudio Zichil, Jovial Mbenga, Sanae Kamlichi. Screenplay: Bas Devos. Cinematography: Grimm Vandekerckhove. Production design: Spela Tusar. Film editing: Dieter Diependaele. Music: Brecht Ameel.

Bas Devos's Here is about soup and moss and names. It's also about fireflies and construction work and family and lab work and evolution and climate change and cities and nature and shorts and rain and long walks and diversity and kindness and whatever sticks in your mind after you watch it and start thinking about it. It must have been an incredibly difficult film to edit: Just how long can and should you hold a shot of men sitting on a bus or branches waving in the breeze before a viewer begins thinking they should watch something else or go get something to eat? I kind of hated it while I was watching and kind of loved it afterward.