Dante' Inferno

Dante’s Inferno, directed by Sean Meredith is an animated puppet show that goes through a “modern day” telling of Dante Allegheri’s age old classic. In the film, Dante, a man lost emotionally in an urban landscape, meets Virgil the ancient poet. Virgil leads Dante on a quest through hell to save his love, Beatrice. From the river Styx, to Purgatory, to all the circles of hell, this adaptation of the film brings modern day people to be accountable for their sins. The movie is highly political and brings in modern day politicians and celebrities. The movie is very aware of itself as seen by the eye looming over the stage at the opening of the film. It speaks to the audience that they are being watched on their deeds just as the characters in the film are. Overall, this short but dense movie attemps to scare the viewer into a more moral mindset. I feel like it loses some weight, however, because some of the crimes committed seem forced and outdated to fit the original story. 

Enter the Void

Enter the Void directed by Gasper Noe follows Oscar on his life and death journey through present day Tokyo. The movie was visually stunning but I really did not appreciate it. Personally I felt like it was way too long and boring. I was informed before the start of the film that the director was famouse for making his movies jarring and disturbing. Due to the loudness of the film both audibly and visually I felt it hard to watch the movie comfortably. Scenes such as the car crash, Oscar being shot, and the abortion, also the final hotel sex scene all disturbed me. I know this was on purpose but I really could just not enjoy it. The story itself was very interesting about how the minutes after death can seem like an eternity and how Oscar floats around seeing all his friends and colleagues go through life without him. The scenes of floating over the city I found tedious and boring. Overall this was my least favorite movie we have seen so far. 

The Five Obstructions

What I thought was interesting about Five Obstructions is how it forced Jorgen to be subjective and embrace the world that he has seemed to separate himself from in the Perfect Human.  The idea of a forced subjective is sort of paradoxical.  He's being thrust into these situations whereby he must abide by the parameters that are set out by Lars, the producer.  In terms of composition I thought that the film read well.  It was a bit long at parts but the promise of each obstruction to come was enough to keep my interest for the most part.  Even though it was a documentary, it read as a traditional movie for me, and I think that it was because there was an obvious transformation happening.  The main "character," Jorgen, is dynamic in that he starts off the film in one state of mind, and comes out the other end with a certain amount of displacement.  He changes, and his struggle and strive for subjectivity is noticeable, which is especially interesting seeing as how the idea of the "perfect human" should be objective.  But the film is not about his short film, it is about Jorgen's journey.  And judging it on that basis, I think it is a success.

The Five Obstructions

This film was incredibly confusing for me. Firstly, I really wish that they had made us more familiar with The Perfect Human before going into the sequences about the obstructions. Without proper background, it made it very hard to follow the film and understand what was supposed to be going on. Secondly, the only way that I could keep myself entertained during this film is to think of it as some sort of reality game show-esque documentary, you know, something along the lines of America's Next Top Model meets Sweet Genius or something like that. It seemed much more like a "mockumentary" than a documentary, an aspect that really bothered me the whole time I was watching it. There just seemed like there was something off and really scripted about all of the dialogue scenes, and that was very unsettling for me.

The Five Obstructions

This film was rather confusing... it was a documentary, with other short film incorporations? It was artsy fartsy and cool, but I couldn't follow it to save my life. The idea of "obstructing" and re-making a previous film in different ways was a cool idea, but I wish the film explained that angle better and more in depth (again with the hard to follow statement). And overall, I didn't even really understand what the original film, "The Perfect Human," was about. This is definitely a movie I would need to re-watch to fully comprehend. I would recommend to other viewers to maybe just watch "The Perfect Human" before seeing "The Five Obstructions."

The Five Obstructions

One of the primary notable aspects of The Five Obstructions, as commented on by our presenter Dittmar, is the essential un-Americanness of it. Its primary focus is short films, a very unpopular artform relegated primarily to art students and amateur directors in the United States. It is also primarily a movie about the close, Platonic relationship between two men: an uncomfortable subject for US audiences, especially if the film is not explicitly comedic in nature. Another unusual aspect of it is the necessary repetition of themes, words, and images as well as longer, less obviously narratively important sequences, which would have little place in American films whose standard length of scene has steadily decreased since the 1950s to the point where most sequences are now less than three minutes. Finally, the film is shot in several different languages without a clear distinction between what is being spoken at the time; normally if there are a variety of languages in a film American audiences expect to be cued into this through some expression in the subtitles or otherwise while European audiences, much more universally multi-lingual, are less interested in such distinctions. 

La Jetée

La Jetée, I believe, is a perfect example of how film is accepted as a fine-arts product.  Walter Benjamin, a German literary critic, once spoke of how plot inevitably gets in the way of film as being art because it distracts from the composition.  If you look at La Jetée as being a response to Benjamin's critique of film, then I think it has to be a success.  This film elevates photography to a whole new level its stillness forces individual-focus of each frame onto the viewer.  It does for photography what traditional animated-film does not always do, in that sense.  It is essentially a photographic essay in the form of a motion-narrative.  I think that something like this forces you to take in the full visual emotion of the story.  It is isolating sound and visuals, in a way in which you recognize that they are independent forces, while still amalgamating them to work together within a compositional narrative.  What this creates is a new way of story-telling-- or rather, it affirms that there are other ways to create emotionally-charged visual narratives.  Just as a circle with two-dots and curved-line is read successfully as a face, so is La Jetée read as an emotionally-impactful film.