The Suspended Vocation
Very nice photography of a monk in a black-and-white film crosscut with his counterpart in a color film. Unfortunately “interchurch quarrels over dogma and religious practice” is not a topic that keeps me alert and engaged. The lead monk is played by Cahiers critic Pascal Bonitzer in color, and Didier Flamand (one of the Dalis in the new Dupieux) in b/w. Based on a novel from Pierre Klossowski, a biographer of Nietzsche and de Sade.
Ruiz in Rouge:
This book talks about all the quarrels inside the church, of different factions in the Catholic church. This was not very different from the discussions and quarrels inside the Left movement in Latin America. Which is not so strange when you think that this movement was composed of ex-Catholics. They transposed old Catholic quarrels into the Left; this is one of the ways you can read the political movements in Latin America.
–
Of Great Events and Ordinary People
That’s more like it – the truefalsiest movie. It announces itself as a doc on Paris’s 12th during election season, but it’s really a doc about making that doc, then a doc about making docs in general, as it gradually swallows itself.
I think Ruiz has seen News From Home, since he opens a slow 360+ degree pan on its poster, and Adrian Martin points out the movie’s closing Le Joli Mai parody.
Ruiz increasingly spices up this cubist lesson in documentary deconstruction with surreal elaborations – such as progressively shorter re-edits of the entire film, avant-garde decentrings of image and sound, and crazy runs of ‘secondary elements’ such as particular colours, angles, gestures and camera movements (collect all shots that pan to the right …). The critical agenda tends to merrily lose itself – which is a mercy in our remorseless age of rigidly theory-driven essay-films.
