The last hurrah for another year. Taking us to fifty films:
40. Violeta Went to Heaven (Director: Andrés Wood)
41. In the Fog (Director: Sergei Loznitsa)
42. The Intouchables (Director: Olivier Nakache)
43. The Hunt (Director: Thomas Vinterberg)
44. Neighbouring Sounds (Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho)
45. Farewell, My Queen (Director: Benoît Jacquot)
46. Pola X (Director: Léos Carax)
47. The Lion of the Moguls (Director: Jean Epstein)
48. La Pirogue (Director: Moussa Touré)
49. While the City Sleeps (Director: Ingmar Bergman)
50. Wuthering Heights (Director: Andrea Arnold)
And that, my friends, makes fifty.
Missing my days at the festival already. I am most grumpy without it. (Though thank-you CS and co for lifting me out of the doldrums yesterday.)
One of the things I enjoyed about watching each film in the cinema was the absolute focus on what was happening on screen. I think this is the most 'in the moment' time for me. I don't think about work, I just think about the story on the screen, from Faust and the devil in many guises (Sokurov's Faust and Easy Money) to stories of refugees, people living through a war and picking up the pieces after war.
It was Franz Kafka who said that "a book must be the axe for the frozen
sea within us" and I agree. I also feel the same could be said of film.
And art. And music.
Those seventeen MIFF days. Rewind. More please.
In other news,
Thanks Philip for your words about a charm of golden finches (in the window of Milly Sleeping)
Paper finches hang on visible thread, mid-flight, pointing into each other. Their profusion seems unreal until I think of pet shops, how birds move with lightning speed. These shapes could be the same bird recorded for a minute. Through glass the sun makes them different yellows.
(finch stopping, on elgin street, Philip Thiel)
Thanks everyone for your recent zine orders. You've made Gracia, Hila and me very happy.
