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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Thursday, June 25, 2026

Black Moon (Louis Malle, 1975)

Cathryn Harrison and Joe Dallesandro in Black Moon

Cast: Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Alexandra Stewart, Joe Dallesandro. Screenplay: Louis Malle, Joyce Buñuel. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Art direction: Ghislain Uhry. Film editing: Suzanne Baron. 

"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!" exclaimed Alice after reading "Jabberwocky." The Alice of Malle's fever dream movie Black Moon is called Lily, and she's played by the teenage Cathryn Harrison, the granddaughter of Rex Harrison. When we first see her she's driving a car along a highway, wearing a man's hat, which we soon discover is a form of disguise. A war is taking place that appears to be waged between men and women. When she is stopped at a checkpoint where a group of male soldiers is executing female prisoners, her identity is uncovered and she flees across country as her car is riddled with bullets. Eventually, she finds refuge at a remote farmhouse, but not before she sees a unicorn. Not the splendid white horse of tapestries and tales, mind you, but a fat old pony with the requisite horn thrusting from its forehead. The farmhouse, she will discover, is inhabited by a bedridden old woman (Therese Giehse) and a young man (Joe Dallesandro) and woman (Alexandra Stewart), as well as a pack of naked children who chase a large pig around the grounds. The man and woman, she will discover in a telepathic fashion, are both named Lily, too. More summary at this point is unnecessary as well as impossible. As Lewis Carroll observes, Alice "didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all." If you're like that after seeing Black Moon, don't feel bad. It's probably not for you anyway.  

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