postarchitectural

I watched Following by Christopher Nolan last week — I’ve always been meaning to watch it, and Le Dernier’s debut black and white awesomeness pushed me to try Nolan’s neonoir debut. Some of the shots, like this first one, could come out of any old noir, albeit with less shadows and more foreground. Other nice moments happen when the two main male characters are tangling and overlapping trying to break into an apartment. One of the longest shots happens when the main protagonist leans, dazed, on a rooftop, and it’s a nice break from the otherwise claustrophobic heaviness of the movie, especially the final shot..

I didn’t end up watching Time of the Wolf, but I did get to see Gomorra last night. After the trailer and the poster I was already pretty much sold, but I wasn’t expecting this surreal opening shot:

There are quite a few of these wildly colored shots — the fabric in the workshop, the hazard suits, and this. It gives the whole movie an uncomfortable feel, and doesn’t let you box it away in some warm toned aesthetic. This shot could be something out of Blade Runner:

I’m sort of a sucker for movies like this — raw and rough movies that fight with masculinity, but there’s something cruel about seeing this happen to kids.

There are all sorts of amazing things that happen without much dialogue. It was actually kind of weird, it’s all Italian and subtitled, but the only parts I could understand were the Mandarin parts, which didn’t have subtitles.

For the rest, body language lets you project so much of the narrative onto the characters. When one of the boys sits on the motorcycle for a little longer, or when another walks by a cop car, there’s a whole unspoken voiceover that’s happening. That’s what makes it so heartbreaking, I guess. So much of the narrative is your own construction, so much of the dialogue is imagined, that the movie becomes like prose, where you own your depiction of the characters.

Zach showed me Le Dernier Combat last week — it came after us all watching the also-excellent-but-very-different Riki-Oh. Watching a hyperviolent prison-fu movie at midnight is something, and it makes watching a movie with no dialogue at 2am that much more refreshing.  

I took a few screencaps after I watched it to remember some of my favorite shots. This one above, as a group of people pull the canteens off of the miner. 

This one, as the protagonist walks through the environment lit only with a couple torches.

The surreal quality of cooking a dinner on a stovetop with a backdrop of revisited cave paintings.

And looking through the manhole.

There are a lot of amazing things happening in this movie, and it makes me think about those “it’s not what it is, it’s what it isn’t” sort of sayings. Black and white, only sound, no dialogue. After souring on Luc Besson after Angel A last year and watching Watchmen a couple weeks ago it’s good to return to this sort of minimalist approach to film. It’s still highly visual — it has to be — but there’s something poetic about the shots and their confidence to stand alone, without a terrible soundtrack, without overwritten dialogue, etc…

It’s gearing me up for watching Time of the Wolf this weekend, hopefully Haneke doesn’t disappoint.