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OK, now that this has been graded I feel like I can post my film response assignment. Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages , the brainchild of Benjamin Christensen, is an an attempt at something akin to a documentary mixed with dramatized scenes. In today’s filmic parlance it might be classified as a docudrama, but with the non-dramatized portions having the feel of an academic lecture. The film asks the question of how the witch trials could ever have occurred – how people could have believed such things and acted upon those beliefs so violently and destructively. The film then tries to answer that question with a ‘modern’ and scientific approach. Stylistically the film, despite its silent era limitations, is engrossing and impactful. Despite it being created in the early 1920s, one could easily argue there are, in fact, special effects in the film. Some scenes have a blue tint, some a reddish (sometimes almost sepia) tone – presumably to delineate day and night. There were double ex

Visceral reactions or existential angst? All the interviews and articles paint "Wild Tales" as being six separate short stories having a running theme of revenge. Ok, that’s true. Revenge does come up in every tale. And they are completely separate stories. They don’t have a single character weaving within them to tie them together, as in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Nor is there the bird flying above, or the narrating writer, that Szifron mentioned having considered adding to weave them into one. But I do see much more than just vengeance as a common theme. The most glaring component I noticed was the theme of power, or lack thereof, and the shifting of it. The rich are uniformly rude and entitled in every story, while the poor get used and pushed around until they usually reach a breaking point. In every story the powerless try to fight back, and the powerful try to stop them, but who really wins in the end is unresolved. There is a delicious vicarious pleasure from watching t

Trains that don’t go anywhere ... La Grande Belleza was hard for me. It’s the first film we’ve been assigned in my contemporary film class that I didn’t fall in love with on some level. My gut reaction to the film the first time around was that there was some profound stuff in it, but that is was achingly long and headache-inducingly convoluted. I just didn't 'get' it. I appreciate it more now, after considering the questions which were posed to us, and reading the articles, interviews, and reviews. There are now things I find interesting about it, and questions it left me, but I’m still not in love with it. The initial party scene instantly made my mind flashback to Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby party scenes. Though I admit the excess and debauchery were grittier and more palpable in this film. But the break-neck montages almost made me nauseous at times.  And after a certain point the cinematography felt like just another layer of distraction in a film so much about exactly that

What is Survival? What is Failure? Those are the questions this film makes me ask myself. I had seen a film called “The Grey Zone” several years ago – which is also about the Sonderkkommando. So the concept and the basic story were familiar to me, in that respect. That movie had been disturbing and haunting enough. However, this film, while upsetting on most of the same levels, seemed somehow more jarring. In trying to figure out why I felt even more affected by “Son of Saul” I came to think it’s mainly due to the cinematography. I feel like the cinematography actually forms its own language in the gaps lefts by the lack of dialog and emotional display by the actors. In watching “Son of Saul” the thing that hit me immediately was the point of view of the camera. So much of the time the camera is held closely on the one character, and mostly from behind him. It gave me this feeling of standing beside him rather than watching a person performing for me. The choice of camera angle and