Young circus artist Leni Peickert has ambitions- to create the most unique and advanced circus for the future. Setting up to create a circus that features completely authentic animals, challenging the artists involved, Leni runs into many difficulties as she works with marketers, finance types, and other artists. Alexander Kluge's Artists Under the Big Top: Perplex is not a very accessible film for average audiences. Dripping of intellectual conversations, Kluge's film uses heavy editing to create a powerful yet complex portrait of arts place in society. Being a german filmmaker, Kluge seems to be most notablly wresting with his own decisions, trying to pinpoint the role of art after such a castrophe as World War II. Artists Under The Big Top: Perplexed wrestles with the relationship of Art and Free Enterprise, capturing the restraints of society and art itself. The circus merely represents any form of artistic expression, with Leni Peickert and her team even discussing in the film the notion of whether art can exist after Auschwitz. This is not a film interested in bashing the commercial side of art but instead merely surveying the various ways they can and should coexist. Kluge's film touches on so many interesting antedotes when it comes to artistic expression but my favorite would be how the film subtelty depicts the give-and-take of individual creativity when involved in a co-dependent art project. What stands out the most over all else is the passion Kluge shows for the importance of art, arguing the monumental importance of the ability to create. Kluge's Artists Under The Big Top: Perplexed is complex and confusing experience, but the film's deep routed message appears to be a rally cry for art in the face of trauma, with art being a tool for change.
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Taking place in New York City during the winter of 1981, statistically one of the most violent years in the city's history, J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year tells the story of Abel Morales, a successful business man in charge of a major Heating Oil company. On the brink of a huge expansion for his company, repeated robberies of his Heating trucks begin to derail everything he has built. Desperate to keep his American dream alive, Abel sets out to find the men responsible for these attacks, which he presumes are coming from his competitors. J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year is an intricate character study that manages to keep its tension from start to finish. Mysterious and engaging, A Most Violent Year is fascinating film that basically draws major parallels between the business world and the gangster world. Played brilliantly by Oscar Issacs, Abel Morales is the type of character that is hard to decipher for much of the film. Is he a good man in a bad environment? or simply the best of a group of scoundrels? This idea is what makes A Most Violent Year so compelling, blurring the lines of between right and wrong as Abel tries to find opportunites to grow his business among the rampant violence and corruption that plague his environment. This isn't a film that takes the simple way out by simply showing the dark side of the American dream, it instead argues that the world we live in is much more complicated than that, offering a compelling portrait of a man being pulled in all directions. Ava DuVernay's Selma chronicles the three-month period in 1965 that saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lead a non-violent protest in an effort to gain equal voting rights for all African Americans. Facing violent opposition from the police and state government, Dr. King led a march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama which culminated with President Johnson signing into the law the Voting Rights Act of 1965. DuVernay's Selma is a biopic done right, opting to focus on a major event in Dr. King's life, instead of attempting to capture his whole life. This approach gives the film a more naturalistic feel, defining a man through a specific length of time instead of the burden of trying to encapsulate everything. Impeccably well made, Selma features great direction, cinematography, and incredible performances to capture the emotional weight of this powerful time in American History. While I would agree that a weakness in the film lies in the rather simplistic portrayal of President Johnson, this is not important when it comes to what makes Selma great. Selma reminds us all how powerful non-violent protests can truly be, reminding all of us that the people run this country, not the politicians (at least that's the idealist hope). Another thing I really appreciated about Selma is its honesty in its portrait of Dr. King. The film captures the strife in his marriage primarily stemming from his adultery, never trying to pretend he is perfect.. Doing so is very important because its makes him human, only strengthening the film by capturing the fragility, mistakes, and emotional strife which weighed on the man. |
AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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