A real tour-de-force in the esoteric category of cinematic visuals of a distorted nature is here.
Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son (Mat i syn) - one of the finest films of the 1990's - uses distorting mirrors and lenses to create an unreal visual style through-out the whole movie; the majority of its images are distorted in one way or nother ("Nother died"). An outstanding and uncompromising feature about the work is that no apologetic clear justifications, or rather excuses, are given for the visual appearance -- no-one is hit over the head with a club nor are there any beer mugs revealed on the foreground, as, say, in the Francis Bacon bio flick Love is the Devil.
Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son (Mat i syn) - one of the finest films of the 1990's - uses distorting mirrors and lenses to create an unreal visual style through-out the whole movie; the majority of its images are distorted in one way or nother ("Nother died"). An outstanding and uncompromising feature about the work is that no apologetic clear justifications, or rather excuses, are given for the visual appearance -- no-one is hit over the head with a club nor are there any beer mugs revealed on the foreground, as, say, in the Francis Bacon bio flick Love is the Devil.
We are priviledged to be part of the final moments of a mother and son's relationship, taking place in a secluded place in the countryside. Intimate views of the characters are intercut with landscape shots, stylized to a degree that they're reminiscent of J. M. W. Turner or Caspar David Friedrich, than regular master shots from films. The thing distinguishing this marvelous attempt from simply creating tableaux vivant versions of the director's favorite paintings is the true sense of time flowing, passing - unique for the cinematic medium. Here the ambiguous nature of the crooked visions gives a sense that we're inhabiting a place somewhere between life and death, a place of transition, of reality being in flux.
But to give a little historical context, the first and most common strategy in using distorted imagery in cinema is to create a narrative context for it which establishes that the distorted visuals seek to convey the disoriented perception of a given character in the picture. There's a ton of examples of this in Hollywood and mainstream cinema, but let's throw John Carpenter's Christine as one title among many. One fairly interesting early example is from the silent era, in the 1928 Teutonic short film Überfall, from Ernö Metzger. A milktoast guy gets in trouble, and is knocked out cold for his efforts by a brutish thug; this breaks the film - until then shot and edited in conventional manner - into a prolonged, ritualized montage of distorted faces and sights.
A little similar experiment was conducted by the illustrious Abel Gance in 1915 with the short La folie du Docteur Tube, which features a conehead-looking mad doc experimenting with a mystical powder, which goes off everywhere, and distorts the surrroundings - the movie is basically a self-justifying showcase for the then-novel visuals created by an anamorphic lens.
An' speaking of anamorphic . . . . .
The fresh Finnish DVD release of Henri-Georges Clouzot's feature documentary The Mystery of Picasso from 1956 isn't really technically what it ought to be. The entire movie basically observes Picasso's pictures being made, and the twists and turns his creative process possessess. Perhaps a little too tedious for my money, at times feeling like watching paint dry - ha! - but it's an interesting little movie (I do prefer Clouzot's documentary on Herbert Von Karajan) which not only mixes together monochromatic and color imagery, but also various aspect ratios. The original theatrical release, and also the U.S. DVD, have the film mostly in the square aspect ratio, but about halfway through Picasso remarks I need a bigger canvas, and the screen expands into CinemaScope. The U.S. DVD has these sections letterboxed, but the Finnish DVD - while being superior to its U.S. counterpart in terms of color and image sharpness - insanely has this stretched completely anamorphically, as you can see in the above screenshots, the Finnish dvd is the one on the left and the U.S. on the right - just like in politics, natch?
Weirdly enough, stretching these paintings even more than goo' ol' Eugene Tooms could bear, seems to give them an additional Picasso-esque quality!
But I still personally prefer letterboxes.
Too bad this anamorphicity (is that a reel word?) extends beyond the showing of paintings on the DVD presentation. This maybe takes too big a step towards making Picasso look like something out of Resnais' Night and Fog:
But to give a little historical context, the first and most common strategy in using distorted imagery in cinema is to create a narrative context for it which establishes that the distorted visuals seek to convey the disoriented perception of a given character in the picture. There's a ton of examples of this in Hollywood and mainstream cinema, but let's throw John Carpenter's Christine as one title among many. One fairly interesting early example is from the silent era, in the 1928 Teutonic short film Überfall, from Ernö Metzger. A milktoast guy gets in trouble, and is knocked out cold for his efforts by a brutish thug; this breaks the film - until then shot and edited in conventional manner - into a prolonged, ritualized montage of distorted faces and sights.
A little similar experiment was conducted by the illustrious Abel Gance in 1915 with the short La folie du Docteur Tube, which features a conehead-looking mad doc experimenting with a mystical powder, which goes off everywhere, and distorts the surrroundings - the movie is basically a self-justifying showcase for the then-novel visuals created by an anamorphic lens.An' speaking of anamorphic . . . . .
Weirdly enough, stretching these paintings even more than goo' ol' Eugene Tooms could bear, seems to give them an additional Picasso-esque quality!
But I still personally prefer letterboxes.
Too bad this anamorphicity (is that a reel word?) extends beyond the showing of paintings on the DVD presentation. This maybe takes too big a step towards making Picasso look like something out of Resnais' Night and Fog:
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