Land in Anguish and Macunaima
I think that with both of the last two films we find a lot of information and intention underneath a confusing, distracting, exterior. Macunaima is successful as a weird, avant garde film, but I think it was trying to do be a lot more than that. The social commentary, the references to folktales, etc. All of that stuff gets buried in how silly it seems. I bet that the translation of dialogue adds to this aspect of the experience. I find the same problem with one of my favorite films from Robert Buchar's Czech New Wave class (which I took a few semesters ago): Fruits of Paradise by Vira Chytilova. It is visually stimulating and exciting, but underneath this there is an extremely dense text that you is hard to understand and truly appreciate without a knowledge of the language and the historical background.
posted by jonrybicki at 12:23 PM
2 Comments:
--I don't mean to suggest that it wasn't meant to be outlandish and silly.
I agree with you, but though I found much of it funny, I don't think I was that entertained. My interest certainly loosed as the movie went on, the aimless story and the character's motivations were particularly uninteresting to me. Normally those things are not such an issue with me, but for this one, maybe because I didn't understand the commentary very much, that was all the stuff I had left to rely on. So while I'm glad I saw it, and would actually like to check out other movies by him (those stills Gabe put up are rather enticing), I don't have much motivation to rewatch this one.
Post a Comment
<< Home