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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Showing posts with label Andrzej Zulawski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andrzej Zulawski. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)

Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill in Possession
Cast: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen, Heinz Bennent, Johanna Hofer, Carl Duering, Shaun Lawton, Michael Hogben, Maximilien Rüthlein. Screenplay: Andrzej Zulawski, Frederic Tuten. Cinematography: Bruno Nuytten. Art direction: Holger Gross. Film editing: Marie-Sophie Dubus, Suzanne Lang-Willar. Music: Andrzej Korzynski. 

As if the story of a woman possessed by ... something weren't enough, Andrzej Zulawski tells it with such feverish restlessness that Possession exhausts the audience well before its frenzied climax. Two men can't have a conversation without at least one of them bobbing and weaving or swiveling in a desk chair. Yet somehow this most hyperactive of horror movies makes its impact, putting its leads, Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, through hell. To what point other than touching a viewer's every nerve? The Berlin setting, smack up against the Wall, suggests a political subtext reflected in the apocalyptic ending, and the dialogue is riddled with references to God and Faith and Chance, but I tend to think that in this case the mannerism is the message.