Naoufel_Boucetta

100/100

"The end of the world is coming in a deluge of rain that is turning the world into a muddy wasteland that mirrors the spiritual condition of its inhabitants."

Bela Tarr collaborates with László Krasznahorkai to create another existential, nihilistic and sociopolitical oeuvre. This Hungarian masterwork has everything, from its experimental and expressive storytelling techniques to its breathtaking and sublime cinematography.

'Satantango' is a poetic and dark fresco, so dark one could feel suffocated by this painting of a humanity dispossessed of its free will, at the mercy of a mysterious determinism, like dead leaves carried away by gusts of wind. The way we see these lost characters evolve, through these intensely long sequence shots, the way the looks are captured by the camera, the dialogues, the movements, all these elements hypnotises the spectator in a "state of disorientation" much like the characters, lost in their lives, drowning in alcohol, walking, giving themselves the illusion of knowing where they are going.

A twelve long and fascinating chapters that don't tell any particular story, but show the man in most total perdition and 'damnation'. A dark atmosphere weighed down by the incessant autumn rains, mud and wind. "Satantango" is an extraordinary cinematic experience, a true monument of the seventh art.

Very intriguing and absolutely fascinating work from Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid.

"Meshes of the Afternoon" criticizes male domination in the mid-20th century and can be considered as a feminist work. It's the story of a woman, forced to stay at home and dreaming of her own escape or 'salvation'. The first few shots focuses only on the young woman's shadow, expressing her current state "being only a shadow of herself". The recurrence of the knife symbolizes the character's desire for death (suicide). This is what many passages show us throughout the film (where the key turns into a knife and vice versa). The key symbolizes the discovery of another world, which becomes a knife, presenting death as the only possible way of escape and deliverance.

A couple's escape to a portion of paradise and their painful return to reality.

Between the raw realism of desire and the incommunicability of feelings, this film shows the dream of youthful passion lived out by Monika and Harry, and their brief rejection of the Swedish society. A piece of remarkable freshness and vitality, crossed with a melancholic and bitter vision.

'Summer with Monika' is an important breakthrough in Swedish and European cinema of the 1950s, being a major source of inspiration for some key filmmaker of the 'French New Wave' like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (with his 1960 'Breathless'), not the strongest work in Ingmar's catalogue (Persona, Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander...) but still a great kicking start for Bergman.