Movie night last Thursday was a real treat…..Jean Luc Goddard’s “Weekend,” (1967) in which this reviewer sees presented a world of sociopaths, wherein people care more about clothing and accessories than they do about each other. One woman survives a fiery car crash which kills several of her companions. Ignoring the mutilated corpses, she becomes hysterical because her fashionable handbag is lost to the flames. Allegorically, and usually violently, the film explores what we value, mainly by hacking into our most sacred and taboo places. Rape? Cannibalism? Rape followed by cannibalism? If it really sucks, you can probably find it here.
But it is funny! Why did I laugh (or more like a snicker through a sneer), when a lady poet is set on fire because she recites poetry rather than give road directions? Is poetry that important? Or is being set on fire that unimportant? I don’t know any more. We are all caught in the endless traffic jam that opens the film. Burned out or burning cars and bodies litter the landscape, but no one in the film (or in the audience) is disturbed or even interested by that. Instead, everyone seems to have their own individual goal in mind, only coincidentally and temporarily on the road with anyone else. Is this a prediction? More than forty years later (the film was released in 1967) I watch the daily news as gang rape and genocide crawl across a ruined industrial landscape on our high def big screen flat television, while famine, drought, flood, fire and horrific violence compete with each other on a global stage for our helpless attention. Funny? Please pass me another kneebone.
I am grateful for our little island of sanity here in Duluth at WSAC. We can meet in relative calm and discuss both our prophecies of doom and our hope and faith in each other, and for our common future.
Thanks for being here. I hope to see you in September at Thursday Film nights in the performance space at 8 pm. You really shouldn't miss this!
Movie night last Thursday was a real treat…..Jean Luc Goddard’s “Weekend,” (1967) in which this reviewer sees presented a world of sociopaths, wherein people care more about clothing and accessories than they do about each other. One woman survives a fiery car crash which kills several of her companions. Ignoring the mutilated corpses, she becomes hysterical because her fashionable handbag is lost to the flames. Allegorically, and usually violently, the film explores what we value, mainly by hacking into our most sacred and taboo places. Rape? Cannibalism? Rape followed by cannibalism? If it really sucks, you can probably find it here.
ReplyDeleteBut it is funny! Why did I laugh (or more like a snicker through a sneer), when a lady poet is set on fire because she recites poetry rather than give road directions? Is poetry that important? Or is being set on fire that unimportant? I don’t know any more. We are all caught in the endless traffic jam that opens the film. Burned out or burning cars and bodies litter the landscape, but no one in the film (or in the audience) is disturbed or even interested by that. Instead, everyone seems to have their own individual goal in mind, only coincidentally and temporarily on the road with anyone else. Is this a prediction? More than forty years later (the film was released in 1967) I watch the daily news as gang rape and genocide crawl across a ruined industrial landscape on our high def big screen flat television, while famine, drought, flood, fire and horrific violence compete with each other on a global stage for our helpless attention. Funny? Please pass me another kneebone.
I am grateful for our little island of sanity here in Duluth at WSAC. We can meet in relative calm and discuss both our prophecies of doom and our hope and faith in each other, and for our common future.
Thanks for being here. I hope to see you in September at Thursday Film nights in the performance space at 8 pm. You really shouldn't miss this!