![]() ![]() I eventually pieced together the puzzle of how I had seemingly dreamed Cocteau's film, but I was already hooked into a relationship with the cinematically surreal. It was the next weekend that I saw Eraserhead and felt more like a nightmare that I had never dreamed than any film I had seen before. I did not understand how that could be as I had no recollection of ever seeing Cocteau's original version it was if it had been summoned from my dreams. I storyboarded it and everything, but then one day our teacher screened Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet for us-and it was the movie I had been planning to make. I was in film school then I went with a plan to make a very specific film. It truly got inside me and made me queasy. I think the first time I had a physical reaction to a movie was Eraserhead. Take me somewhere I have never been! Freak me out!! Change me!!! It is an incredible offer we audiences give to the filmmakers, but so few really choose to take us up on it. When we sit down to take in a film, we offer a challenge: go ahead, and blow my mind. This June at After Hours, experience remarkably distinct non-genre-conforming cinema with a selection of four films curated by guest programmer Ted Hope. You may never be the same again, but you’ll be better for it! – Ted Hope ![]() I just dare you to try to mix all of that into one drink and consume it in a single sitting. Roger Ebert and others have credited cinema with being an empathy machine, and its power to help us walk in the shoes of another certainly is one of the attributes that attracted me to the medium, but Abassi’s film forces us to see the alien or monster in all of us, the love within the monster, the monster within love, the absurdity of reality, and the reality of absurdity. I saw it in Cannes and once I realized what I was in for, the smile never left my face. One of the most joyous “body horror” films ever, Ali Abassi’s Border has the distinction of being one of my top exhibition experiences of the last decade. When she comes across a mysterious man with a smell that confounds her detection, she is forced to confront hugely disturbing insights about herself and humankind. ![]() Tina (Eva Melander) is a border guard who has the ability to smell human emotions and catch smugglers. "This is a movie that aims to startle in overt and subtextual ways the less known before viewing, the better." -Glenn Kenny, The New York Times "An exciting, intelligent mix of romance, Nordic noir, social realism, and supernatural horror that defies and subverts genre conventions." -Alissa Simon, Variety ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |