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

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Monday, May 25, 2026

A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982)

Nelly Frijda, Edda Barends, and Henriëtte Toll in A Question of Silence 

Cast: Edda Barends, Nelly Frijda, Henriëtte Toll, Cox Habbema, Eddie Brugman, Hans Croiset, Erik Plooyer. Screenplay: Marleen Gorris. Cinematography: Frans Bromet. Art direction: Harry Ammerlaan. Film editing: Hans van Dongen. Music: Lodewijk de Boer, Martijn Hasebos.

Janine (Cox Habbema), a court-appointed psychiatrist, examines three women on trial for a mysteriously random murder of the owner of a boutique. The women were strangers to each other before they assaulted the man, who accused one of them of shoplifting. Janine's task is to determine whether the women were insane when they committed the crime, and she comes to feel empathy for them when she examines the ways in which they were discriminated against by the men in their lives. Marleen Gorris crafts an intriguing courtroom drama that has been dismissed by some as feminist agitprop, but deserves praise for the way Gorris manipulates our attitudes toward the issues it raises.   



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