spoilsbury_toast_girl

Great film if you just want to let loose your mind and abandon all other thoughts. As expected, the wealth of the images to a wonderful score is nothing less than fantastic, this time closer to people's faces while they're working their asses off, struggling with dirt, dust and garbage or just staring right into the camera, often a little uncertain, sometimes with proudness, but never with pride and always quite affecting. Alle these worn out, contemplative Third World faces we see in close-up or in half distance show the mortality and vigour, the pettiness and dignity of mankind at the same time - that's the underlying beauty of this overwhelmingly ugly world. There's one particular image that I've kept till today: in a reoccurring scene taking place somewhere in the Middle East, Reggio focuses his lenses at a little girl in tears and dust clouds steering a racing horse cart over a bumpy road always in danger to fall over while, which seems to be, her father lies next to her on the box, unable to move and seemingly wasted. She is obviously in pain and desperation and yet masterfully manages her difficult situation (to drive her drunken father home?), probably not for the first time. Quite powerful.

My favourite screen adaptation of Carroll's classic novel, because it's so different from the cute dreamy candy-coloured wonderland which Alice is usually visiting. I still haven't read the source material; I probably think I've become too old for it by now, but that's just a stupid excuse. Or maybe because I know the story inside and out (as depicted by Disney and other overly optimistic offerers). That's why I was so positively surprised by Svankmajer's dark and eerie version, far from what I would have expected even when I read the filmmaker's name. Svankmajer does make strange little films, from what I know and saw so far, sometimes even quite whacky stuff. This film is no exception, but it has an uniquely morbid atmosphere due to the fascinating stop-motion animation and the unsettling sound effects. There's no conventional dialog which is reduced to a minimum and mostly recited by Alice herself from a third person perspective with the attachment "...says the white rabbit" et al. This technique doesn't allow us to feel with and for Alice and to delve into her fate; it rather makes us aware that we are merely within a tale. There's no way we can get lost in the intellectual world of six-year-old Alice; she remains to be a self-contained, pretty incommunicative little girl that's just trying to get out of this nightmare (without being ignorant to oddities that constantly pass her way out), and we are just observers of her dream. It's a film made not for everyone for sure; as a squeamish romantic or a lover of the more optimistic versions, you'd probably hate it. I, for one, am all in for a morbid, decayed, rotten cinematic vision, especially when it hits a children's classic and completely turns it upside down.

A masterpiece of the highest order. If there's anything like perfection, this short film would be the epitome of it, at least in the cinematic sense. Marker's only fictional story in his career is told not through moving pictures, but stills that are sorted and superimposed. It is a necessary stylisation to give the film this unique power and enchantment that it has. It's a science-fiction story after all, and its documentary look, through-composed as a sequence of snapshots in a figurative photo album, makes it much more reliable.

Another thing: when the protagonist remembers a photograph that he has seen in his youth, we, the viewers, are facing a similar puzzle of pictures. La jetée leaves us forming a formulated, living universe, similar to the protagonist who defines his whole purpose in life out of one single impression. He lives and feels only through the knowledge of this important picture which has such an enormous, spectacular effect on his puerile soul, so that he even develops the ability to travel through time and space to liven up his memories and make that one photograph tangible for him. So, with the plot in mind, there's absolutely no other choice to tell the story than in this way. And this way is peerlessly productive and effective, formally poetic, reflexive and a perfect dream.

There's especially one particular moment, that I'm sure will go along with me for the rest of my life: when the beloved girl seems to blink her eye at us (me?) and exposes a smile. Marker uses only frozen single pictures of her, but in this very shot he shares a deeply moving, genuine, vibrant moment of happiness and affection with us in an ultimate profession of love to the art of film and love itself. It is probably one of the greatest, most emotional moments in the history of cinema. Art to be meant to last forever. (10/10)