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Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus) at the Brooklyn Museum as part of their Free First Saturday program for March. The acting was kind of odd, especially near the beginning, and I agree with All Movie Guide that no motivation is given for retelling the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice other than as some kind of basis for filming Carnival. That being said, I don't think this film needs any reason to exist other than music and dance. The panoramic hilltop views of Rio de Janeiro are also quite nice, but not as memorable as that insistent, pounding rhythm underlying almost the entire movie.
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First Graders at MoMA as part of the Abbas Kiarostami retrospective. I had hoped to see
Taste of Cherry last Thursday, but felt awful basically all week, so that didn't happen.
First Graders is definitely a minor work, though indicative of Kiarostami's focus on children, partly or mostly due to his funding by state-sponsored Kanun. It's a nice enough view of, well, first grade boys going to the office to be punished or explain away their misdeeds.
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Close-Up at MoMA as part of the Abbas Kiarostami retrospective. Much more complex formally than
First Graders. A "docudrama" rather than a documentary. Mostly the plot is re-enacted by those who participated in the actual events, although the actual trial proceedings are filmed. A poor man named Sabzian impersonates the well-known film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and cajoles a middle-class family by the name of Ahankhanh into lending him money and letting him stay at their house. We view the swindle from a variety of strange and seemingly unnatural perspectives, while Sabzian and the family detail most of what went on from the courthouse. In the end, after being forgiven, Sabzian goes back to vist the Ahankhanh family, this time joined by Makhmalbaf himself.
Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa discuss the formal complexity of this film in the
Kiarostami entry of the Contemporary Film Directors series. However, what I found most interesting was the suggestion that filmmaking, particularly for a poor Iranian like Sabzian, holds the same status and power as professional basketball does for many young African-American males.
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And Life Goes On... at MoMA as part of the Abbas Kiarostami retrospective. This is a fiction feature, though it does portray actual rubble from the June 1990 earthquake that killed as many as 40,000 Iranians. An actor portraying Kiarostami leaves Tehran to look for the Ahmadpour boys, who starred in 1986's
Where Is the Friend's House?, in rural Koker. The director, accompanied by his son, basically drives around for the entire film, asking for news of the boys and also about the misfortune of those whom he passes on the way.
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I plan to see another four or five parts of the retrospective this week, and as many shorts and early films as I can handle on the weekend.
Labels: Film, Lists
